Burning in DVD Hell

I am surely burning in what is most likely DVD hell. I've recently taken it upon myself to solve my compatibility issues between my DVD burner, my home theatre system and my writable media. For some reason, my burner doesn't like the newer DVD+R/W media. It has no problems doing anything I want it to with the DVD-R/W or CD-R/W or whatever, but the +R/W is giving me nothing but headaches. Add to that the fact that if I want to do any dual layer burning, I have to get the +R/W stuff working because the even newer DVD-R/W DL might bring on even more compatibility issues, and they're harder to find.

So, I've done some tweaking, I'm learning about bitsetting and book types and encoding and burning and ripping and you name it, I've read it. Firmware updates and other bits of software are flooding my system and none of them seem to be doing what I want them to. My media players are acting up, probably because of all the crap that I've added to the system that are probably hogging codecs or changing file associations. Plus, I downloaded something that I think had some kind of virus in it because my computer pretty much crashed on me last night at about 2 in the morning giving me fatal errors and the like.

*sigh*

I had some limited success practicing with a Dave Matthews DVD. I managed to get it to sort of play in both my DVD burner and my DVD player but beyond the menus it didn't really do much of what it was supposed to do. Especially off of a direct rip.

I dunno, anymore. I'm obviously too stupid to stop trying so I'll be taking a crack at it again tonight and probably tomorrow. I'll see if I can give Ahab a run for his money.

mike