Popular Products > Computers > Dual Layer Burners

Dual layer technology provides additional recording space on a single side of a Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc (DVD). The Dual layer DVDs have two recordable layers so that more information can be recorded on them. A standard DVD provides 4.7GB of storage space, but a Dual Layer DVD, as the name suggests, doubles the recording space to approximately 8.5GB on a single side.

Two important things should be kept in mind before “burning” or recording information on a Dual Layer DVD. The DVD burner should be Dual Layer enabled and the recordable DVD disk itself should be Dual Layered. A Dual Layer DVD is easily distinguishable from a standard DVD. On a Dual Layer DVD, DVD+R DL or DVD-R DL is always written. Most DVD drives and players available today can read the information recorded on a Dual Layered DVD disk. For many years, this Dual Layer technology has been used for producing commercial DVD movies. Now, this is also made available for home and business recording.

Dual Layer DVD recordable discs provide up to four hours of high quality MPEG-2 video or up to 8.5GB of data on a single-sided disc with two individual recordable layers. Dual Layer burners can write on the Dual Layer DVD recordable discs, single layer DVD discs as well as on CDs. A recorded Dual Layer DVD disc is compliant with the DVD-9, which is the popular term for Dual Layer DVD technology specifications. These discs are compatible with most consumer DVD players and computer DVD-ROM drives available.

However, the recording speed of Dual Layer burners is slower than that of traditional burners. The latest Dual Layer burners write or burn double layer discs at a slower rate (up to 16x) than the single layer DVDs (up to 20×). This ensures better recording quality when Dual Layer burners are used. Consumers can now enjoy viewing better quality movies with Dual Layer burners. Dual Layer burners provide up to four hours of MPEG-2 video on a single-sided disc, and this additional space increases the bit rate of the video while burning it. This ensures higher quality video on the recorded disc.

The 8.5GB of uncompressed DVD disc space allows you to store your valuable data and applications. A single Dual Layer DVD disc can store up to 12 CDs or 5,902 floppy disks of information.