DVD+R question

[Dog80]

How much information is a DVD+R is supposed to hold? I bought a spindle of 25 4.7GB DVDs, but Nero won’t write more than about 4.480GB. That’s quite a difference.

Also, can I overburn DVDs? I couldn’t find such an option on Nero. Is it possible?

[xizor]

It may depend on the hardware.

According to this
“This internal PC drive will offer the fastest achievable DVD recording speed – sixteen-speed (16x) on a DVD+R disc- as well as the largest capacity of 8.5GB on a single sided, double layered DVD+R disc.”

[Sunspace]

You may have experienced the classic “marketing gigs” versus “engineering gigs” discrepancy.

Disc makers, to make their discs seems as large as possible, lablel their discs in billions of bytes. A DVD-R can hold approximately 4.7 billion bytes. Howver, the disc marketers refer to this as “4.7 gigabytes”.

A true gigabyte is 1024[sup]3[/sup] bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

The DVD FAQ on disc capacities and the gigabyte confusion.

There’s an unfortunate confusion of units of measurement in the DVD world. For example, a single-layer DVD holds 4.7 billion bytes…, not 4.7 gigabytes (GB). It only holds 4.37 gigabytes…

The problem is that the SI prefixes “kilo,” “mega,” and “giga” normally represent multiples of 1000 (10^3, 10^6, and 10^9), but when used in the computer world to measure bytes they generally represent multiples of 1024 (2^10, 2^20, and 2^30). Both Windows and Mac OS list volume capacities in “true” megabytes and gigabytes, not millions and billions of bytes

Most DVD figures are based on multiples of 1000, in spite of using notation such as GB and KB that traditionally have been based on 1024. The “G bytes” notation does seem to consistently refer to 10^9. The closest I have been able to get to an unambiguous notation is to use “kilobytes” for 1024 bytes, “megabytes” for 1,048,576 bytes, “gigabytes” for 1,073,741,824 bytes, and “BB” for 1,000,000,000 bytes.

This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but it’s not trivial to someone who prepares 4.7 gigabytes of data (according to the OS) and then wastes a DVD-R or two learning that the disc really holds only 4.3 gigabytes!