Media compatibility is one of the biggest issues for an Optical Disc Drive (ODD) manufacturer. Many users carefully select which DVD burner they buy, but unfortunately don't realize that the quality of the blank CDs and DVDs can vary a lot between different brands and manufacturers, and therefore influences the end-result.

We recommend users to buy media from well known media brands to get the highest possible quality. Lesser-known brands can have much higher failure rates, mostly because these brands get their media from manufacturers that can't meet acceptable quality standards.

As a hardware manufacturer Lite-On IT is putting a lot of efforts to get the highest possible quality on as many different types of media. Thousands of different discs are tested in our R&D facilities in order to define the best writing strategy for each tested brand. To make sure our drives are compatible with as many different kinds of media, we regularly provide firmware updates (which you can find in the download section, here).

Another solution that Lite-On offers to reduce failures on low-quality media is the so-called SmartWrite technology. SmartWrite automatically optimizes and recognizes the optimal writing strategy for each different kind of media. Click here to read all about SmartWrite.

But again, we would like to emphasize the importance of buying high quality blank media in order the get the best results. There's and old saying that says: 'you get what you pay for'. If you look for the cheapest no-brand media, don't expect brilliant results, even though we do our best to produce the highest possible quality.