The VSO Software have published a significant report about the success/failure rate of DVD recorders and media types. The report is based on the data collected by their best selling software products: DivxToDVD, PhotoDVD, CopyToDVD.

The amount of collected data is huge and the statistics show some interesting conclusions about the reliability of DVD recorder brands. Keep in mind though that the failure of a recording process can be caused by some other software or hardware issue than the drive or the media itself.

The report is copyright and published with the permission of VSO Software

Today you can benefit from the first results. What are the most popular CD and DVD writer manufacturers ? What is the best DVD format to use +R or -R. Is that important to update the firmware ? to know about this , read the following...

Database summary

With 30000 new records per day we can quickly analyse new drive behaviour and detect compatibility issues. We use this database for support , suggesting the best drive or the best media brand for customers.
The average success rate is 92.5 % , some people may consider it is not so high, but the behaviour of customers leads to believe they try several time when the burn fails, and before realizing it is a poor media quality issue, or any other reason, the success rate is lowered. As we will see later, the best drive combined with best media can jump up to 97% of success rate.

Interesting to see there is more than 1600 different drive models, and 800 different media
As we will see later the top 5 drive manufacturors represents much more than 80% of the market.

Chapter 1 - What is the most popular media format ?

CD vs DVD : It is not a big surprise, the DVD format is getting more and more popular, it is also due to the main usage done by VSO products and affiliates. At this time only BlindWrite and CopyToDVD are still used to produce CD copies

DVD = 80 %
CD = 20 % of total burns

More interesting now is to see what is the usage of the different DVD format, there are basically the + and - families ( R and RW ) and we split a section to see the popularity and success rate of the DL media

DVD format graph

DVD format details.

We can distinct 4 big categories, the R ( writable one time only) , the RW ( writable several times ), RAM media and the Double Layer ( capacity of 9 Gb such the commercial dvd movies ) which now is available for + and - Format.

iR format ( +/-) is used 88,2% of the time while RW is about 11% of the usage
and DL ... so promoted by manufacturors ( drive and media ) represents only 0.7 % of the total burns
RAM format is used less than 0.05 % ! RAM is not popular with VSO products.

iIf we look after the battle between + and -, we can clearly see than - format is more popular, but + is a little bit more reliable with 94,1% of success rate.

When it is matter of RW usage, the +RW seems to be the best choice.

The Double Layer format are still not very popular and you can see the overall failure rate is much bigger than single layer. This is due to a lot of compatibility issue, media quality and the complexity of the technology.

Chapter 2 - Hardware manufacturers

Here is the list of the top used brand :

As you can see the popularity decreases quickly after the top 5. BenQ despite the 11# place will focus our attention later.
LG is leading , followed by NEC then Pioneer and Lite-ON. If we combine HP/SONY/Lite-ON ( because Lite-ON is producing for Sony and HP ) we could resort the chart. Plextor which is well known in the community is only at the 9# place probably because they don't bundle their units with a new computer as often than the top ones.

LG is #1 in use, it is also the only one which never replied to emails from VSO. when NEC / Pioneer / Lite-ON / Plextor / BenQ are quite nice to help us to support their newest drive and newest technology, LG despite several attempts doesn't feel concerned by alternative software developers. If any manufacturors not mentionned wants to collaborate to use this database or help VSO to provide a better support, they may contact us ( see contact section )

The top 4 manufacturers take more than 50% of our reports.

Chapter 3 - Popular drives analytics

Using the database we will focus now on some important drives. We selected them either their popularity or their quality

Here the chart of the top 20 used drive sorted by use but with the successful completion rate in the right column.

It is not a surprise to see LG leading the chart with a very popular drive ( even it is not the most recent model from the company ). Nec and LG place several drives in the chart, while the most used ( and not the best quality one ) SONY drive is only at the 20# position.

The average success rate in the database is 92.5% so it let you define what is a good or bad drive, when the drive is over this value, it means the overall performance ( whatever the media brand used is quite good ) when the success rate is around 90% or below, you can seriously consider the drive is very sensitive to media used or the drive is not so good.

On the quality point of view, LG and NEC ( for the most recent drives such 25xx , 35xx, and 45xx models ) the results are very good, Plextor and its popular 716 model is also in a good position. Samsung, Pioneer and Sony are not impressing.

If we don't care about the popularity of the drive ( some drivers are too recents and can't be in the first positions with a database running since more 6 months ) Please consider also these drives :

Plextor PX-740 : 97,5 %
Toshiba R5112 : 97,5 %
BenQ 1640 : 96,9 %

The report is copyright and published with the permission of VSO Software