This is not a request for help. I'm just sharing information that might be of use to the forum. I have a Philips DVP-642. I've had it for over a year now and never had any serious problems with it. It plays Verbatim DVD+R DL discs with no problems.

I recently bought and LG DVD burner for my PC that supports Lightscribe and DVD-R DL burning. I thought I would buy some DVD-R DL discs and see what I thought. I bought a 3 pack and I've used 2 and my DVP-642 does not like these very much. Several times on each disc, the player will freeze up for a few seconds and then resume playing. I never had that problem with any DVD+R DL discs. I checked my DVD-R DL discs on a PC and played them at the points that gave my DVP-642 problems and I find no problems playing them on a PC. I even stepped through the "bad areas" and found no glitches on the discs.

I made image files using PGCEdit and then burned them with ImgTool Classic. I didn't burn with Nero, as some of you might have guessed. DVD-R DL is weird in the way the disc is laid out. The specs require the layer break at a specific unchangeable point and the disc will be padded to fill up any blank space. The technology behind DVD+R DL seems a lot better to me. By the way, I have read some things that seem to indicate that Nero cannot correctly burn DVD-R DL discs because of layer break issues, so if any of you want to experiment with this format, don't use Nero to burn it. PGCEdit and ImgTool Classic are the only things I know of that can correctly produce and burn a DVD-R DL disc. If you use ImgTool Classic, you will have to manually set the layer break. You can't let the system determine that for you or the disc will refuse to burn. Set the layer break for the same value PGCEdit uses as the size of the L0 layer.