Why are burned DVD's notoriously unreliable? I know there are problems
with DVD+ and DVD- and people trying to "burn" protected DVD's, but if
it is in the correct format and the orginal is not protected, why are
they having problems? I really have not had any problems with viewing
burned DVD's, is it just because I am lucky?

Burned DVD video seems far more tolerant of errors. I've had HORRENDOUSLY
bad reliability problems with burned DVD media. This being from several
different brand discs, different burners, software, PCs and even locations.
Seems a good many discs just don't want to let you record multi-gig files
onto them. Well, they'll let you RECORD but you're screwed if you want to
read them back whole. And I'm talking about storage intervals of sometimes
less than ONE MONTH! This in a controlled temp/humidity environment. It's
bad enough that I've gone back to TAPE.

Note, I'm talking about DVDs here, not CDs. I've had better luck with CD-R
media, but they're not large enough to hold the files involved (large
..tar.bz archives of XML data)

-Bill Kearney