TEXT MODE..............

[firebyrd10]

Dvd +/- are basicly the same thing.

Dash was first and is the only "offical" standard.
Plus was created because companies didn't want to pay royalties.

I have a dual burner. I use + for RW and - for R. Why?
Well - has the most compatablity with dvd player (given, now + works equally well). But for RW, I went to wal-mart and all they had was 2x -. So I picked up some + which was 4x. It's stuck every since.

Though now + has an advantage of -. They have stable dual layer burning support (Discs aren't cheap though, 8-10 dollars each).
And now that almost every drive is +/- is up to you which format you like more. No real reason to pick one over the other.

[eco2geek]

Well, they all have their pluses and minuses..........

Here's a comparison from an Extreme Tech article from January '03. (I would assume that +R and +RW are comparable, as are -R and -RW, but I could be wrong.)

DVD+RW Pros:

• DVD+RW supports defect management; DVD-RW does not.
• DVD+RW drives support both CLV (constant linear velocity) and CAV (constant angular velocity) spin rates. The second is particularly important for PC users, as it allows for higher speed DVD and CD-ROM reading.
• DVD+RW has been adopted by Microsoft to natively support the Mount Rainier standard for drag-and-drop, rewritable optical storage.
• DVD+RW supports high-accuracy editing of 32K blocks in place, called "lossless sector linking"
• DVD+RW supports variable bit-rate encoding for video, resulting in better image quality in high-motion scenes.
• There's no lead-on or lead-out times needed during write
• There's no "finalize" state to creating a DVD video disc, unlike DVD-RW.

And here are some advantages of DVD-RW over DVD+RW:

• Despite the goal of universal compatibility, more consumer DVD players to date will read DVD-RW disks than DVD+RW disks "out of the box". If allowed to set the compatibility bit (as in the HP drive we reviewed a few months ago), that number goes up. Note that newer consumer drives can read both formats.
• Most mastering houses that will press consumer DVDs are set up to accept DVD-R media; some will accept DVD-RW as well.
• There's currently greater penetration and awareness of DVD-RW among authoring professionals. Although aftermarket DVD+RW solutions exist for the Macintosh, the Macintosh can natively read and write DVD-RW.

When I bought my DVD-R/RW drive, and asked about media to back up my computer (just the R kind; I haven't yet encountered a situation where I'd want to erase and reuse a CD or DVD blank), the salescritter said, "Buy +R." Why? "That's for data." Oh, OK then, good solid technical answer.

[OErjan]

here you have some more on dvdburning.
i use this with knoppix, atleast when i help others that have usb capable computers.
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/
why usb? that is because i still have a external usb2 dvd+-r/rw writer, sadly my p100 has no usb, and i have not found any working "16bit pcmcia" usb card, if i had i would buy it asap, even at 30euros.