Amidst company announcements, standards publications, forum discussions, marketing hype and press releases "bombarding" the average DVD consumer, what are the actual "plus" and "minus" of each recordable DVD format rival? PC-based DVD recorders are becoming particularly compelling devices for the average PC user.

Prices drop, media are widely available and the tools for creating audio and video compilations are maturing.

Cost per gigabyte for data backup seems to favor the use of DVD's instead of CD's. Everything being now in wide availability, DVD-R/RW recording formats follow this trend as well.

Beyond the original and official DVD-R/RW format, there are now also available recorders that seem to be able to burn discs of another non-official, Philips supported and marketed, rival format: DVD+R/RW.

Consumers are questioning over the net on whether the plus format will increase or relief their troubles during recording. CdrInfo.com undertook the task to bring to its audience the results of over 1,000 tests of the latest 4x DVD recorders and media concerning the readability on those players and readers widely available on the market today.

We chose an equal number of dash (-) and plus (+) format recorders with an equal number of respective media and tested one-by-one the readability of the burned discs on about 5 dozens of players.

You can read the details of the compatibility tests concerning the DVD media formats -R/RW and +R/RW, as they appear in the relevant review in the section "Articles" of the CdrInfo.com web-site, here.

For all those impatient to learn the actual numbers, you can find them here.

You can also choose there from a list the particular player for which you want to see detailed test results.