There seems to be a lot written about Nero and the various issues when burning DVD Videos on Sony DRU500A (and some other burners). I have tried to summarise this below - perhaps other people could help me by adding further details to these points. That way, I hope to help myself, and other people, to the most compatible Nero burns! I have a Toshiba SD220, which seens to play just about anything - however, I want to burn discs which my friends too can read.

1) There was an issue with Nero 5.5.9.17(.1) which prevented disc closing on +R media, on the Sony drive. This has been fixed in 5.5.10.0. I have successfully closed Intenso +R on 10.0

2) The DVD-Video template in 5.5.10.0 is LESS compatible with set-top players than the same in 5.5.9.17. It does appear to burn an ISO/UDF filesystem, but maybe with a UDF version other than the 'standard' 1.02. Can someone confirm this? Is there a utility that reports the UDF details? Has anyone compared directly an image burned in 5.5.9.17 and the same in 5.5.10.0?

3) There have been 2 conflicting recommendations (on various forums) for the settings use to burn discs. Option A is to select 'ISO/UDF', uncheck all boxes on the ISO tab, make sure UDF is 1.02. Option B is to use 'UDF only', with 1.02. The majority of users report ISO/UDF to be more successful, though 'UDF only' is necessary for some newer machines. As most retail discs are burned as ISO/UDF, can someone explain how this doesn't work with all players?

4) On Nero 5.5.10.0 there is an option to 'make Xbox compatible'. Does anyone know exactly what this does? Surely if there is a bug which stops Xbox compatibility, this should be fixed for all burns, rather than a user option. I have compared a disc using 'xbox compatible' with an identical one not, and can see no differences. Both work fine in my player.

5) Some users say that RecordNow is much more reliable, producing compatible discs. Do ALL burns made by this program work? What filesystem dows this default to?

Sorry for the long post, but there seems to be so much confusion, I'd like to try to clear some of it up!

Cheers,
Mark.