After spending a fair chunk of time at cdfreaks, and after lots of googling, I think I’ve managed to bring myself relatively back up to speed on DVD burning. In December of last year, I purchased an NEC 3550A DVD burner, and burned all of one disc with it. I hadn’t touched the drive until a few days ago when I started getting low disk space warnings. As I went to begin burning discs again, I realized that I didn’t know nearly as much about DVD burning as I should’ve or would’ve like to. I couldn’t even recall my drive manufacturer (surprising for me). Plus, I was pissed that a disc that I had burned in December using DVD+R DL media was not reading properly in my laptop dvd drive. So, I set out to understand “it all.” In the course of several days, I’ve learned all about booktypes, bitsetting, MKM dyes, Ritek, Nero CD-DVD Speed, and binflash, and I’ve read about the perils (but potentially massive benefits) of crossflashing, and so much more.
In the end, I’ve narrowed down the problem with my laptop dvd drive to two possible reasons: this particular Samsung combo drive doesn’t like DL media even when it has been bitsetted to DVD-ROM (this drive was made before DL as a technology even existed) or I need higher quality discs. It’s probably the latter as my old Lite-on 163D has no problem reading DL media. Joy. Where’s Verbatim when you need it?