How to burn CDs and DVDs easily

If the waves of hype rolling in from all directions are to be believed, computer users the length and breadth of the land are busy saving – commonly referred to as burning – home videos and photos onto optical discs (CDs and DVDs) in order to share the results with family and friends.

Unfortunately for many, the real experience can be far removed from the digital-age puff.

Thanks to a crowd of competing disc and drive standards, muddled by a mass of arcane abbreviations and specifications, it can often be difficult even to know where to start, let alone actually produce a disc that can be used.

Over the next few pages, we’ll do our best to banish such befuddlement so you can tell your DVD-Rs from your elbow.

Disc content
Put simply, optical discs are discs on which content is both stored and retrieved using the properties of light.

More specifically, a focused laser beam is used either to etch small pits onto the disc’s surface (when writing or burning data), or to detect those same microscopic depressions when reading information back.

The most recognisable optical discs in existence today are CDs and DVDs, though the term can be used to describe any disc dealt with in this manner.

There are many compelling reason for the computer user to both understand and take advantage of optical discs and the drives used to create and play them.

As mentioned in the introduction, proponents of optical disc technologies – that is, the drive manufacturers and the companies that sell the discs – have focused their marketing on promoting the ability to share treasured family photographs and home videos.

This is indeed a persuasive sell, with a single DVD able to hold several hours’ worth of video, or thousands of digital snapshots.

For the music addict, meanwhile, the ability to burn CDs means freedom from the mixes released by record companies – just create your own compilations.

Nor should we overlook the benefits that writable optical discs have brought to more mundane areas of computing.

Taking regular backups of important files and folders may be tedious, but it is essential; and the large amount of storage afforded by recordable DVD technology, for example, can speed up the chore.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the number of optical disc formats now in existence is overwhelming – and there are even more on the way.

Disc differences
So, where to start? Well, a good idea is to concentrate on the two optical disc formats mentioned earlier – namely, CD and DVD.

Most people are familiar with this pair, and it is from these two formats that most of the optical disc market blossoms.

Broadly speaking, CDs are associated with music and audio, while DVDs are considered video-bearing discs.

These links are historical rather than indicative of any major technical differences, as both types of disc store information in the same way.

A CD is just as capable of storing video data as a DVD, though the storage capacity of the former is considerably lower than that of the latter.

CDs and DVDs were once nothing more than containers for commercial products, such as music albums and movies, or, in relation to computing software.

The CD came first, with DVDs arriving a few years later.

Typically, a CD can hold about 700Mb of data, which is plenty enough for a music album or a software application.

But video information, such as a home video, requires much more storage. The DVDs of movies available in shops use a format that, in effect, doubles the amount of the disc.

DVDs are the same physical dimensions as CDs – with a diameter of 12cm – but the pits representing the data are packed much more tightly together onto the disc’s surface, which means more information can be stored.

How much more we’ll discuss a little later, because optical disc capacity is a world of confusion all its own.