I have purchsed 100 Verbatim 4xDVD/RW discs. Half of them would not let me reformat to use again after a single use. I sent them back to supplier who replaced them. The same thing has happened. These discs should be able to be reformatted and used many times. I am hoping you can test some yourselves by formatting and then trying to record from TV to recorder. The same thing is happing with SONY discs. I dutifully clean the recorder heads once a week so the problem is not there.
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Welcome to the Community @doonside,
Maybe and maybe not. DVDs/units can be finicky beyond just being clean, eg the lasers and electronics degrading. We had one that was periodically problematic and the discs worked fine in another PC. I swapped the DVD units and the problem followed the DVD unit.
I bought a new DVD unit to replace the questionable one and no more problems.
Have you tried the DVD’s in another PC as part of the process of elimination? It would be most unexpected for the failure rate you report and from multiple manufacturers.
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You haven’t said whether these were DVD-RW or DVD+RW. And yes there is a big difference. Also, whilst they may be 4x speed, don’t rely on that.
I have rewritten on dozens of rewriteable disks, but have always stuck with DVD-RW, no more than 2x speed, and quality disks. A hundred pack on a spindle are not going to be high quality.
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I haven’t used RWs in a few years since USB sticks have mostly pushed them aside, and always bought bulk but rarely had a problem regardless of which ‘flavour’. My norm was the fastest speed on the label 
Your suggestion of sticking with 2X is good advice though, especially when a user is having problems.
It could easily be that a slightly degraded or marginal DVD unit could provide very good service at a lower speed than the default or faster speeds, as it could be the range of DVDs is more amenable to slower writing.
A failure rate of ‘half’ suggests more is going on than merely low quality media, even if it is a mix of lower quality media and faster speeds than burn properly, regardless of labelling. A good thought, yours!
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My past experience with Sony branded rewritable disc products has always been positive. I’ve also usually purchased bulk packs on spindles. No recent purchases to compare.
Even with unrecognised brand names the discs rarely failed to burn and play back reliably with Video or image files on other devices.
If there were issues, they were typically remedied by replacing the DVD burner. We had 5 adult/late teen users in the home. We now use a mixture of portable devices, USB or SD Card based, and network storage (NAS).
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Like most, I haven’t used DVD/RW discs for some time. I used to have many optical drives, and what I did learn was that some drives just did not like certain brands, or even batches of discs. I bought discs at computer fairs (back in the days when they had them), so bought lots of different brands, including Verbatim, and Sony.
I could put a disc that didn’t work in a drive into another another drive on that PC, or into another PC’s drive and it would work.
So, it may be an issue with your DVD recorder’s optic disc drive
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Fortunately, Verbatim is coming to the party and replacing faulty disc. I am very grateful.
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That is good news but implies you might not have them yet? Plz post back to confirm your problem is resolved after you have used a few.
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