First of all what you know as DVD (or CD ) burning software is actually called a optical disk authoring software. That means that there is much more going on when you try to write a DVD than just burn data onto it. For an optical disk to be written, an image with a full file system of the disk, must be first created. The file system is different depending on the optical disk used, but in the case of DVDs Universal Disk Format (UDF) is used. Another important thing to consider when writing a DVD is the optical disk itself. There are many choices on the market today and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the standards and specifications, so here’s a quick heads-up.
The DVD-R has a storage capacity of 4.71 GB (or 4,488 MiB) and was developed in 1997 by Pioneer and was approved by DVD Forum. As a direct competitor to DVD-R we have DVD+R that has 4.7 GB (4.377 GiB) of storage space and was developed by DVD+RW Alliance in 2002. Both of these optical disks can be written upon only once, but by using technologies like double-layer, a DVD+R disk for example can attain storage capacities of 8.5 GB. On the other side, DVD+RW support Random Write access memory which allows data to be erased and re-written on the disk for a large amount of times. A DVD+RW disk has a storage capacity of 4.7GB.
But to create a disk image and file system to write on an optical disk you need authoring software, or, the more commonly named, “software that burns DVDs”. There are a lot of programs out there that are able to write on DVD disks, many of them having more features that just write on disk, but Nero is by far the most known.
Nero burning ROM, developed in the beginning by Ahead Software. Now a standalone product, it is one of the best known disk burning bundles on the market. The name, Nero burning ROM is a pun intended on the historical myth, that the roman emperor Nero played his lyre as he watched Rome burn. This is also supported by the logo that presents an image of the roman Coliseum in flames.
Despite many condemnation of Nero due to the high amount of bloatware (unnecessary features) present in its bundles, and due to the relatively high price ( up to $80.00), the software remains one of the leaders in the market. Another interesting feature that Nero offers is the fact that it has a Linux version, thus being accessible to a larger public.
But there are free alternatives to Nero, such as Burn My Files, CDBurnerXP Pro or InfraRecorder. Although free and quite reliable many of these programs lack some of the features users grew used to and thus have little or no success.
So when you intend to write a DVD you should take in account the optical disk you are going to use and the burning software. The features you need, the safety technologies employed by the software and
lastbut not least, the price of the software.
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