Hi guys, I'm looking to do an all around upgrade for my movies. I currently have a Litescribe Tsstcorp tsh552L and im pretty sure it sucks, but its hard to tell because my dvd player also sucks. I mainly use my pc for burning tv shows my wife and i miss due to our schedules, or movies to dvd. What drive would you guys recommend, and whats a decent dvd player for playing burned movies without breaking the bank? Thanks a ton in advance!

In my opinion a good all around dvd burner would be the Samsung SH-182, its a good reader and burner, as for dvd players I like the basic Panasonic dvd players, I cant remember the last time one wouldnt play a movie that I backed up onto a Verbatim +R,+RW or -R disc.

thanks for the reply. I will have to look into the price and all. With my current setup when watching a burned dvd i get glitches throughout the movie as well as skipping in areas. Very annoying.

What you described is quite often caused by burning to fast, using low quality media and or out of date firmware. For dvd media the only brand that I will buy that is made in Taiwan is Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden is what myself and many that I know consider the best and can be purchased online at the following: www.supermediastore.com www.rima.com and www.meritline.com, I only get their regular or premium line media.

I am not sure if your asking for a home theater self contained unit or a dvd burner for a computer.

But ill just say this DVD burners have come a long way. Check out www.newegg.com and look for the burner with the highest reviews. It will probably cost you 30 dollars and will have 16x dvd recording speed and support every format out there. NEC, pioneer, lighton are all good brands. Not to forget samsung. The burner technology now days its so mature and saturated. I mean everyone has a burner now that operates at full speed typically. Not to mention media has come down in price. You can get TDK brand media in 100 piece spindles for less then 40 dollars and are on special on the time everywhere.

A short while back I bought a 50 pack of TDK 16X +R media to test with and wasnt to impressed, didnt have any burn related problems but playback wasnt reliable, on average only 1 out of every 3 would playback on 4 different dvd players even when booktyped to read as dvd-rom, used about 3 different programs at various burns speed from max down to 8x and even 4X, even the test score results werent very good using Nero Speed Tools, K-Probe and PlexTools. Maybe due to the fact that the media had a CMC-MAG crap media I.D. As for newegg.com excellent website, thats where I order most of my dvd burners from and also where most of the parts for my new build came from.

Yeah I just bought my new system there this week. I have seen problems as well but it was drive related. I would burna movie and play it back in another computer and it would freze and skip and sometimes not even work at all. I had the burner replaced and had no more problems and used the same media. I had problems again recently with a different drive. So I bought a plextor burner, hoping that its not disposable at that price. At least the drives are cheap now.

Most burning or playback problems are usualy media related, using cheap low quality media, other causes would be burning to fast, not upto date firmware, older burner with newer media where the firmware may not support the newer media. For DVD +R/-R media the only media made in Taiwan that I will buy is Verbatim my fovorite media to use is Taiyo Yuden (not their value line). I have about 12 dvd burners, various brands and only using those two brands of media I would say I only had one defective disc out of maybe 1500 burns. By the way did you get the Plextor 760A burner? Ifso heres a word of advice, if using DV+RW media only use Verbatim, I tried some made in Taiwan Sony and Maxell and the burn reliability wasnt to good, also the 760A isnt very reliable with lightly scratched DVD+RW, if the +RW disc is new it has no problems but if it has some light scratches it either wont recognise the disc and if it does burn to it it may make it unrecognisable. I am currently in touch with a tech support supervisor with Plextor working on the problem, I have experienced this sofar with 3 replacement 760A drives from them. I am waiting to find out what software and media they used to test the last replacement drive with.

I like the external DVD combos. They give you more utility for plugging into other media players. Nero has a utility tool kit that will evaluate your DVD combo for performance and speed (Nero DVDSpeed) This software come with Sansung SE-S164 from Newegg. My five year old Liteon 163 would not read certain commercial audio tracks. This one does at many times faster downloading. Note that the ext drive models cost about twice as much as internal drive optic systems. PCWorld has a listing of their top five int. and ext. DVD combos.