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I found this interesting. It's lifted from the dvd forum at cdguides. The link isn't working right now. It's a bit old (references to burn speed), having been posted in Feb, 2003.
The DVD DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM
standard is made up of over 230 companies. The big names giving it support are:
Hitatchi
Matsushita (Panasonic)
Mitsubishi (Verbatim)
Pioneer
Phillips
Sony
Thomson (RCA)
Time Warner
Toshiba
Victor (JVC)
The +R/RW forum has more supporters which are
more PC oriented. You will notice some of the same names
on both standards.
Phillips
Hewlet-Packard
Sony
Yamaha
Ricoh
Mitsubishi
Thomson (RCA)
Dell
Fujitsu
In North America you tend to find
more PC drives are geared towards DVD+R/RW, while more
standalones are DVD-R because of Panasonic.
DVD-RAM has been around for quite some time. It?s also
very good for Data, but not much more then that. The only
standalone DVD players that support DVD-Ram are made by
Panasonic. If your intrest is STRICTLY data then this is
probably the best format to use currently because of size. A
DVD-Ram disc can be up to 9.4 Gigs on one side while the
other standards can only be up to 4.7 Gigs.
So what are the real world differences between the disk
types? They both write at the same speeds (DVD+RW now
writes at 4x so it has an advantage over DVD-RW which only
does 2x) so for the most part it just comes down to
compatability. Check vcdhelp for player compatability to see
if your player is on the list or not, and which format it
supports. They have a list of pretty much every DVD player
out there. Check out the user comments of others that have
the same player. Sometimes a player may support a format,
but not fully support it so it may have issues. Check it out
here athttp://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers.php Also
please post your comments about your player there and give
back to the community that helped you out. Especially if
your player is new.
Most older players tend to favor the ?R format while more
newer players seem to support both. I haven?t seen to many
standalone players that actually play DVD-RW and DVD+RW.
A lot of players on the VCDHelp site claim to be DVD-RW and
DVD+RW compatible when they really aren?t so be careful
there.
The one advantage that I really like about DVD+RW is the
ability to do packetwriting. What this means is if I am using
DVD-R and DVD+R and I write to it, that?s it I can?t write to
it anymore. If I am using DVD-RW I can format it and write
again, but what if I have one file that I want to change? On
DVD-RW that?s not really possible. I have to format the disk
and reburn all the contents. With DVD+RW I can delete that
one file and add it without formatting.
One other thing to watch for as far as what you buy is the
price of the disks. Currently you can buy ?R blanks in stacks
of 100 for about .60 a disk for cheap disks. The cheapest I
have seen +R discs for is 1.55 a piece for a stack of 100.
DVD-R has been out longer and definitely has a price
advantage at this point, and probably will continue to have
this advantage for quite some time. At this point and time
that is the main reason I would go with ?R over +R.
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