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What format's do the major CD manufacturors use? Why do prerecorded CD's always work, but "home burned" CD's have various issues.

I use "music only" cd's, not sure if that makes a difference, I will try just "R" type next time. I recently burned a CD on a music only type. It worked everywhere, except on my company supplied Compaq Armada 700M, which has a cd-dvd rom. And that same CD didn't work in another employee's Compaq either (same type). Then my friend made a copy on a "R" type cd, and it worked on my laptop. I took it home and it would not work on my home JVC cd-dvd machine, it would not be recognized. So, with this, I figured I have both types of cd's, so there must be some type of formating or configuration difference in the failing machines, not necessarilly a CD issue. That is why whatever the music industry uses works everywhere, so is that the quality of the machines they use, the format they use, or the CD's themselves???

Mode0 ISO-9660 ... thats the standard CD format which will work in all CdRoms

there are alot of newgames (suchas Half-Life) which will not work in older CdRoms - because they require ModeXA to work

there is no such thing as MODE 0 IIRC. Most data CDs are MODE-1/2352 ISOs. (ISO-9660 session)

The problem is not so much related to the format (MODE / ISO-type) used on the CD, but the physical clarity of the surface of the disc.

Factory CDs are pressed, so that they have very clear lands (bumps) and pits in them, which are easy to read. The CDs also last better as well because of their structure. CDRs and CDRWs however use chemicals which have their properties altered by a laser - this means that the bumps and lands are slightly "blurry", far less clear than normal CDs, this means that they are harder to read and much easier to make unreadable via scratching or finger prints.

This does not usually affect PC-CDROM drives because they have very good reading capabilities, however laptop drives and CD audio players do sometimes have problems because their CD reading units are often of a lower quality and cannot cope with CDR media. CDRW media is even less clear, especially after multiple rewrites.

The best format for making CDs which work on all drives should be standard TAO (Track At Once / Non-RAW) audio, or for data CDs, MODE1/2096 non-RAW (the burner fills in the other bytes).

MODE2 and MODE2/XA images often give a great deal of problems.

Half-Life also screws older CD ROMs because of its defective C2 sectors (basically bad, unreadable areas on the disc) - part of the rather lame SafeDisc copy protection.