Consumer DVD compatibility test
 

The July 2002 issue of Digital Video (DV) magazine has an excellent article on recordable DVD technology. As you are aware, there are a number of different formats out there (DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, etc). Will they all work in all DVD players?

The author of this article had 5 different companies participate in testing these formats. They ran over 2400 unique test requiring over 400 hours of testing labor. There were some 17 brands of DVDs tested. He burned 5 sets of 39 DVDs and sent them to the testing companies. They used 27 models of DVD-video players (Akai, Apex, Denon, GE, Hitachi, JVC, Kenwood , KLH, Magnovox, Mircosoft, Oritron, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Proscan, RCA, Samsung, SMC, Sony Thomson, Toshiba, and Zenith).

To make a long story short, there were some players that performed perfectly, ie played all 39 discs. They include:

Apex AD660
Microsoft Xbox
Pioneer DV333
Pioneer DVDV7400
Pioneer PDVLC10
Sony DVPS330
Sony DVPS360
Toshiba SD4700

Conclusions in brief:
DVD format, media brand and player interact to determine compatibility.
DVD-RW and DVD+RW are very similar.
The most campatible format is 3.95 DVD-R for Authoring
Name brand media are more compatible than off-brand media.
Of the DVD players tested, 90 percent show some incompatiblity.
DVD players manufactured since 2001 are more compatible.

Anybody out there familiar with the Sonys listed above and how they work with all KVCD formats?