Types of Media Supported by Computers

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Zach with Expert Village and we've already talked about burning CD's and DVD's and dual layer DVD's but not all systems can support all these different media types. So I am going to show you how to figure out what your system can support. In finder, open up your hard drive and click on the applications folder. From here you can use the utility folder to access the system profiler. The system profiler gives you an overall view of your computer's system and its abilities. Under the content there is a hardware tab that will probably be automatically expanded but if it's not, you can click the arrow icon next to it and expand down the list of hardware on your system. One of these items listed is disk burning. This tells you what your drive is capable of and what it isn't capable of pretty much. You will see that can write CD's is under CD write and list of values are RW. This means it can write regular CD's and it can also write rewritable CD's. Underneath that is a field called DVD write. This supports a few different methods of burning including reading, reading and writing and also writing to dual layer and there are different little symbols for all of these such as dash-R that can read DVD's-RW for reading RW's and also writing to dual layer. There are different little symbols for all of these such as -R that can read DVD's, -RW for reading RW's, +R for burning DVD's and +RW for burning and rewritables as well, +RDL for dual layer support. If your system doesn't support dual layer or it doesn't support rewriting or might not even burn DVD's, you can purchase this external DVD drive that can burn just about any type of media. This is a good solution because not only can you burn dual layer or burn rewritable disks but you can also use this drive with other computers. So if your friend needs to burn a DVD, you can take the drive over to their house and use it over there. "