Vendor Conductor:	VSO Software
Software Used for Testing:	BlindWrite CopyToDVD ConvertXToDVD PhotoDVD
PDF Download:	Download Burner & Media Report

Description

Chapter 1 - What is the most popular media format?

CD vs. DVD : It's not a big surprise, the DVD format is getting more and more popular. In December 2005, we found out that 80% of users were burning on DVD. Today, we see that the trend has increased to 90%. This is also due to the fact that most VSO and affiliate products do not offer the option to burn on CD. At this time only BlindWrite and CopyToDVD are still used to produce CD copies.

DVD = 90%
CD = 10% of total burns

Now let's look at the use of different DVD formats. They are divided into 3 categories + , – (R and RW) and DL media.

DVD format graph

Media Type	# of Uses	# of Successful Burns	Ratio
DVD-R	6 371 049	6 013 915	94.39%
DVD+R	5 005 329	4 782 319	95.54%
CD-R	1 175 788	1 043 754	88.77%
DVD+RW	711 950	667 523	93.76%
DVD-RW	222 716	198 241	89.01%
CD-RW	166 577	139 814	83.93%
DVD+R DL	147 476	130 807	88.70%
DVD-RW	106 738	94 789	88.81%
DVD-R DL	4 419	3 809	86.20%
DVD-RAM	4 216	3 160	74.95%

DVD format details [sorted by uses]

They are divided into 4 big categories, the R (writable one time only), the RW (writable several times), RAM media and the Double Layer (capacity of 9 GB, like commercial DVD movies) which is available for both + and - formats now.
R format (+/-) is used 91.3% of the time while RW amounts to 8,7% . The DL format , despite being heavily promoted by drive and media manufacturers, represents only 1.1% of the total burns.
RAM is not popular with VSO products as it only accounts for 0.05 %!

For those who wonder which is the best format between + and - , here is what our survey unveils: the – format is more popular, while + is a little bit more reliable with a 95,2 % success rate.

For the RW format, the + is also the best choice as far as reliability is concerned. The Double Layer formats are still not very popular and you can see the overall failure rate is higher than for single layer. This is due to a lot of compatibility issues, media quality and complex technology.

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