"Nothing" means I cant burn. Rendering and preparing is completed. When inserting writable DVD to burn I get
"An error occured while writing a file. Error: 0x8004e0c8 (message missing)".
I did not have this problem before. Any idea what causes this message ?

Its hard to say what's wrong. If you get as far as completing the project and and once you start to burn and you immediately get an error message it tends to point to your DVD burner hardware or that DVD-A has compatibiliy issues with your burner or there is a conflict on your system with different DVD burning applications. Since they all must interact with the hardware, some simply don't get along and you may have to pick one DVD burning package. Forums and newsgroups are filled to overflowing with these kinds of problems. I've had good luck in that both DVD-A and Nero get along happy on one system and don't bug one another. Many people report all kinds of issues.

The other most common problem is either incompatable media or you simply got a bad batch of blank media. It happens. That's about all I can say. If you bought blank DVD disks in bulk, trying picking one from the middle of the stack.

Also it would be useful to know when you're getting the error.

If you get it immediately, and I mean within a few seconds of starting and you see no or very little progress on the status bar showing the burn progress that usually mean a hardware problem or a conflict with the software you're using not being compatable with your DVD burner.

If you get maybe 3-5% into the burn, then you get a error message a good guess would be it couldn't or didn't complete the lead-in phase.

If you get to the point where the progress bar indicating progess gets to 90% or more then stops, could be a lead-out issue. If you have the trouble somewhere between the lead-in and lead out where its actually burning data, then you could have hit bad media. The tip off here is usually the burn will start but fail to complete at various points. With hardware issues you usually have the error message appear always at the same point like 3 or 4% into the burn.

Well, I think I was getting a very similar error message when I tried burning with DVD Architect. I figured it out in a very round-about way, but it works.

What I'm doing now is, I prepare the DVD with DVD Architect. Then I open up the files in DVD Shrink 3.1. Then I do a backup to an .ISO file. Then I go into Nero Express (came wth my drive) and I burn the .ISO file to the DVD.

I couldn't find any answers to the error message DVD Architect gave me when I tried burning so this is the solution I've come up with and it works for me. I'm just doing this as a hobby too, so as long as I get it done I don't care how.

I hope that helped!

Thanks for your advise. Unfortunately it still does not work. I even went and bought some more brand new discs.
Here is the problem. The window prompts me to insert the DVD. After doing so it takes some 15 to 20 seconds and the 'flickering light' turns green. I then click on OK. In the past this was the point when the burning process started. Now a window appears stating "Retrieving media info. Please wait". I have never seen this before. Anyhow, I waited and waited and waited (at one time up to thirty minutes). Nothing is hapening. When I eventually click this window away the error message 0x8004e0c8 comes on.

Like I said earlier I dont understand much about computers and do not recall the burning speed when it worked before however, I just noticed that the speed is 1.0x only. The 'little box / window' does not offer any other speed. Isnt that very slow ? (I have a Matshita DVD-RAM LF-D311 A123).

Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

It sounds to me like you've got some other software on your system that's causing problems, it's detecting the DVD being inserted and then jumping in line ahead of DVDA - you shouldn't be seeing a "retrieving media information" pop-up (this is probably the other software).

You didn't happen to install something like B's Clip or some other sort of UDF packet formatting software, did you? Sometimes these DVD burners ship with lite versions of software - did you install anything that may have come with your DVD burner? Look in your system tray, see if there's something that has a DVD/CD type icon - this may be what's causing the problem, so try disabling it.

--Scott