Is anyone aware of any studies of the longevity of DVD-R and in particular any manufacturing methods that would tend to favor a longer service life for one "brand" of media over another?

It seems that most of the people that complain about given media do so because it creates coasters. I'm not really so concerned about that (unless the error rate is over 20% or so), but am worried about the media failing over time.

I have a Cendyne/Pioneer A05 clone and will be writing mostly video and MPEG-2 data files created from either DVD Studio Pro or Roxio Toast Ti.

I would like to find a reasonable heuristic to determine the best media at a reasonable cost ~$2/disk or less that will last 7 years with a low chance of failure. It would seem that products that were made in Japan (e.g. Maxell, some TDK, some Sony, Fuji) or that offered a longer/lifetime warranty might have some relevance.

The fact that differently badged media can have the same media codes and different user experiences is troublesome (e.g. the Fujifilm DVD-R and the Memorex DVD-R seem to have the same media code, even though they're manufactured in different locations).

The unbadged Riteks that I bought online worked fine for me burning (though I only burned 4-5), whereas I did have some problems playing a Verbatim (I'm guessing the CMC ones) in a Sony PS-2 (but not XBox).

I don't really care about burn speed either (as most of the MPEG-2 encoding takes a long time anyway).

I was tentatively considering the Ritek G03, the Samsung Be-All, varying TDKs, and the Fujifilm DVD-R (based mostly on user experiences). I guess I'd prefer the Maxell DVD-R (branded), but I haven't seen them for < $4