Originally Posted by bimmerluv

my understanding is that quality of DVD media can't be judged by brand, as many brands are just re-labels of various quality media. however, the discs themselves have an internal media ID which gives some indication of the actual manufacturer. and generally speaking, it seems that the media manufactured by JVC Taiyo Yuden & Mitsubishi Chemical seem to have the highest quality. Taiyo Yuden use to only manufacturer for other brands, but it seems lately they are selling direct to retail now too.

In association to "brands", Verbatim has had a good reputation of using either JVC Taiyo Yuden or Mitsubishi as their manufacturer. So, if you have to go by "brand", then Verbatim might be the way to go. However, you might still want to check the media ID of whatever batch of discs you get. There are some "cheaper" Verbatim that might not be as high quality.

On another note, DVD+R media seems to be better than DVD-R. There are various technical reasons that one can read about online/google. However, for me the most convincing argument is that every bit stored on DVD+R is protected by parity/error correction while on DVD-R, only about 3/4 of the bits are protected. This means higher chance of unrecoverable read errors with DVD-R compared to DVD+R.

I have an old batch of DVD+R with media ID "SONY/D21" that seem to be of high quality, but I didn't mention it above because they are no longer being manufactured. But if you have some older SONY brand DVD media from pre-2010, check the media ID. There are free programs online that one can use to check the media ID.