Which DVD Burner?

Are there really any differences in DVD burners? They are all pretty much the same. Yours burns CD-R are 48x, so its faster there then some DVDs which top out at 40x. Just make sure it has either IDE or SATA in the back, whichever you need for your system.

http://www.osta.org/technology/dvdqa/dvdqa4.htm

I try to stick with drives that can report raw PIE/POE/POF error rates so I can get an idea of the burn quality. Most LiteOn drives I've seen do this.

Data stored on CDs and DVDs, can't be read cleanly because dust, scratches, and imperfections in the media cause errors. To get around this, they use extensive Error Correction Codes (ECC) which are able to detect the errors and correct them.

This is true even for DVDs that look pristine. EVERY disc produces errors during reading, if not for error correction you wouldn't be able to read most of the data on ANY disc.

There are two levels of ECC - "inner parity" and "outer parity". RAW error rates refers to the rate of errors of the data as read off the disk, before error correction. PIE means "Parity Inner Errors", which can usually be corrected. "POE" means "Parity Outer Errors", which refers to errors too severe to be corrected by inner parity. And POF means "Parity Outer Failures", which means errors so severe that they couldn't even be corrected by outer parity - and therefore the data is unreadable.

People have this idea that if they're able to play or read the DVDs that they've just burned then all is well with the world. In reality, the disk may have been very poorly burned and there may be a ton of PIE and POE errors which are BARELY correctable. The drive corrects the errors on the fly as it reads the data off the disk and the disk appears to be pristine, but in reality any degradation of the disk at all could result in some unrecoverable data. The only way to tell a very good burn from a barely readable burn is to scan the drive to see what the raw error rates are.

Lite-On is a company that makes DVD drives (among other things): http://us.liteonit.com/us/
So a "LiteOn Drive" is a drive made by "Lite-On".