Ok, I finally got all the parts to try this. First, the disclaimer.
SonyEPM has posted in another thread that DL burning of DVDA projects is not supported - we already know that DVDA cannot handle a DL burn itself, but the statement of no support for burning of DVDA projects means: if you try this, you are on your own and don't go crying to Sony support if it doesn't work (or me either ;-) All I am doing here is posting the results of my own testing - I consider myself to be a pretty geeky guy, so if you have any concerns/questions about your own geekyness, then you may want to wait until official support comes from Sony before playing with this.
Hardware: NEC 3500A DL Burner with 2.18 firmware
Media: Ritek RiDATA +R DL 2.4x
Software: DVDA 2.0a (build 121), CopytoDVD 3.0.38
Whatever you use for a burner, it is probably going to be very, very important to have the most recent firmware you can find. My burner shipped with 2.16 and refused to recognize the RiDATA media. An upgrade to 2.17(which the US NEC site says is the latest) did not solve this. A visit to the Ritek web site showed a table that claimed I needed 2.18. A little searching with google found me an official NEC 2.18 firmware copy on the NEC site in Denmark - hurray!
The project was authored in DVDA - 4 of the latest episodes of Enterprise (sans commercials). Rendered as an elementary stream with the rest of the settings at default (because I want to also play with authoring in DVD Lab Pro). Besides the WYSIWYG in DVDA getting wierd on me when I added the 3rd movie (it started re-sizing everything), DVDA estimated the final project at 7.1GB - actual size (base 10) was 6.6GB - not too bad considering I had some animated thumbnails which almost always throws off a DVDA estimate.
The project was then prepared in DVDA (I just clicked on by DVDA's complaint about the size).
Invoked CopyToDVD (from VSO software) - fed it the VIDEO_TS.IFO file and it promptly informed me it was too big for a DVD5 (expected as my default drive is not DL capable). Changed the drive to be my new NEC and CopyToDVD promptly changed to DVD-9 at 2.4x.
The NEC drive was connected to the laptop via USB. One clue that I finally had the correct firmware was 1) CopyToDVD reported the correct maximum copy speed when the media was in the drive, and 2) It didn't error out when trying to burn.
Proceeded with the burn, and approx 40 minutes later, the media was ejected from the drive with no errors reported.
Put the newly burned media in my Toshiba DVD player - player did it's load thing and took me to the menu. I than ran thru each of the 4 episodes at 32x - all content was accessable. I could not find the layer break, but then at 32x I didn't really expect too - however, the player didn't seem to have any problem zooming along across the layer break at 32X. I did view at normal speed in a few areas where I thought the layer break might happen, but could not see it - which really means nothing, as I was most likely looking in the totally wrong place.
Later I plan on re-authoring this project in DVD Lab Pro and seeing if Pro communicates any of the pre-mastering info that it can generated to CopyToDVD.
--Scott
SonyEPM has posted in another thread that DL burning of DVDA projects is not supported - we already know that DVDA cannot handle a DL burn itself, but the statement of no support for burning of DVDA projects means: if you try this, you are on your own and don't go crying to Sony support if it doesn't work (or me either ;-) All I am doing here is posting the results of my own testing - I consider myself to be a pretty geeky guy, so if you have any concerns/questions about your own geekyness, then you may want to wait until official support comes from Sony before playing with this.
Hardware: NEC 3500A DL Burner with 2.18 firmware
Media: Ritek RiDATA +R DL 2.4x
Software: DVDA 2.0a (build 121), CopytoDVD 3.0.38
Whatever you use for a burner, it is probably going to be very, very important to have the most recent firmware you can find. My burner shipped with 2.16 and refused to recognize the RiDATA media. An upgrade to 2.17(which the US NEC site says is the latest) did not solve this. A visit to the Ritek web site showed a table that claimed I needed 2.18. A little searching with google found me an official NEC 2.18 firmware copy on the NEC site in Denmark - hurray!
The project was authored in DVDA - 4 of the latest episodes of Enterprise (sans commercials). Rendered as an elementary stream with the rest of the settings at default (because I want to also play with authoring in DVD Lab Pro). Besides the WYSIWYG in DVDA getting wierd on me when I added the 3rd movie (it started re-sizing everything), DVDA estimated the final project at 7.1GB - actual size (base 10) was 6.6GB - not too bad considering I had some animated thumbnails which almost always throws off a DVDA estimate.
The project was then prepared in DVDA (I just clicked on by DVDA's complaint about the size).
Invoked CopyToDVD (from VSO software) - fed it the VIDEO_TS.IFO file and it promptly informed me it was too big for a DVD5 (expected as my default drive is not DL capable). Changed the drive to be my new NEC and CopyToDVD promptly changed to DVD-9 at 2.4x.
The NEC drive was connected to the laptop via USB. One clue that I finally had the correct firmware was 1) CopyToDVD reported the correct maximum copy speed when the media was in the drive, and 2) It didn't error out when trying to burn.
Proceeded with the burn, and approx 40 minutes later, the media was ejected from the drive with no errors reported.
Put the newly burned media in my Toshiba DVD player - player did it's load thing and took me to the menu. I than ran thru each of the 4 episodes at 32x - all content was accessable. I could not find the layer break, but then at 32x I didn't really expect too - however, the player didn't seem to have any problem zooming along across the layer break at 32X. I did view at normal speed in a few areas where I thought the layer break might happen, but could not see it - which really means nothing, as I was most likely looking in the totally wrong place.
Later I plan on re-authoring this project in DVD Lab Pro and seeing if Pro communicates any of the pre-mastering info that it can generated to CopyToDVD.
--Scott