I forwarded the message to friend of mine who does professional DVD authoring.  This is his response. 

1. $1 DVDs suck. (He is highly exagerating too, the cheapest are about $5-and they suck too). As a rule of thumb, the cheaper the media the less players it will work on. Pioneer media is the most expensive (still about $15 a disc when you buy in bulk) and will work on virtually everything but not these

http://www.dvdmadeeasy.com/subscriber/compatibility/media/media_a_r.html
2. If he is on a Pioneer burner (which is probable) he is using A03 burner (those are the ones that do the DVD-R and DVD-RW). A03 won't work with the sucky $5 general purpose DVD-Rs (as opposed to authoring DVD-Rs). A03 burned discs also have more compatibility issues than A02 discs (the burner I have).

3. If he is using a VCD as a master he is using MPEG-1 (the codec VCD uses) not MPEG-2 (the codec for DVD). Also, the maximum data rate for a DVD is about 9 megabits per second. The maximum data rate for VCD is 3.5 megabits per second. Also, the screen resolution for a VCD is 352x240 (half-res). DVD is full-res at 720x480.

4. If he doesn't realize this stuff, there are about 100 other things he does not know, so I bet he can't encode very well either.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Bennett [mailto:christopher_m_bennett@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 3:06 PM
> To: klf@mailman.xmission.com
> Subject: Becoming OT Re: [KLF] VCD
>
>
> Well..I can get DVD R discs for about USD $1 a piece..
> hmm..I think more DVD players than imaginable can read
> DVD+R
> http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdplayers.php?DVDname=&DVDselect=&dvdr
> =1&Submit=Search&Search=Search
>
> The real problem would be transferring a 4.7Gb image
> to you for burning! ;)
>
> --- Thomas Touzimsky <thomas@klf.de> wrote:
> > I got a DVD+RW burner that can burn both DVD+RW and
> > DVD+R... problem is that
> > not all players can read DVD+R standard, and the
> > empty discs are quite
> > expensive compared to CDs...
> >
> > Wasn´t able to create a video DVD with Nero, but
> > they say that Nero can´t
> > handle this that good anyway. Maybe I´ll try out
> > Ulead´s tool...
> >
> >
> > cy@  Thomas
> >
> >
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