I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet, but media quality is very important as well. Cheap media won't read in some drives and standalone players. Cheap media also degrades quickly. I backed up some of my movies onto cheap DVD media and it wouldn't read on even the DVD recorder. Took a while to figure out what was wrong. I bought some high quality media and everything was fine after that.
I go to
http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=60 to see people's feedback on different media. I'm sure other sites have similar forums so just check around. Verbatim used (still does? I dunno) to have excellent quality, but is/was expensive (haven't bought media in a while). Ritek has good quality for not-too-expensive prices. Do some research first though. Some people say that cheap media works fine for them, but for me it didn't. So I'm just giving you a heads up in case cheap media doesn't work for you...