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CD/DVD Burning (Advanced)

Overview

In addition to burning simple CD-Rs and CD-RWs, both operating systems support writing to DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW. Both can burn the cross-platform compatible ISO-9660 format, though only Mac OS X writes to that format by default. Windows XP also supports HighMAT format.

Mac OS X

For advanced burning options, use Disk Utility.

Disk Utility supports advanced functions, like creating and burning disk images. Disk Utility can also verify the data integrity of your burned discs. You can even use Disk Utility to make images of DVDs that can be then be replayed directly off your hard drive (please respect copyright laws, and duplicate your DVDs for your own personal use only). Often, disk images of commercial DVDs are too large to fit onto a 4.7 GB DVD-R, but as long as the image is small enough, it can be burned on to a DVD-R.

Windows XP

XP lacks support for creating disk images, as well as verifying data integrity of burned discs. Microsoft offers a utility called CDBurn.exe as part of its Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools which lets you burn CDs from ISO images.

Conclusion

For advanced burning, Mac OS X is more capable than Windows XP. Disk Utility can create and burn disk images while also verifying data integrity. XP lacks all of these abilities except for burning disc images, which requires a separate download.

Mac OS X: 7
Windows XP: 1

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