Why is Overburning a DVD impossible?

Hi all, Great forum. I've leaned a lot here. But this overburning question has never been explained, and it is driving me crazy. Yes I have read the FAQ and it 'glosses' over the overburning issue without providing a real answer. I *know* it must by physically possible to burn 300 to 400 more megs. on a DVD beyond 4.7 GB. Why can we not trick the burner into writing data in the 'lead out' area like we can do with regular CDR's? Is there a way to modify the ATIP if it in fact exists at all for DVD-Rs? Standard DVD-R capacity is 2,297,888 sectors = 4489 MB. Why can't we somehow adjust this (it seems very arbitrary)? I have tried burning an .ISO image larger than 4489 MB with DVD-Decrypter and it gives an ASPI (sector out of range) error. So it seems to not be a software limitation. Can we modify the firmware of the drive somehow? I'm using an A04 burner by the way. Thanks for any help you can provide on what is for me a very frustrating topic. Standards are meant to be stretched. I know compatibility goes out the window when this is done, but that is the price I am willing to pay. Witness the 99-min CDRs for example. Much appreciative of any replies.

4.37gb should be plenty for you. You don't need anymore. If you encoded the video and it doesn't fit on the DVD, then you need to pay more attention to your bitrate calculation ;p Not trying to be harsh, but why would you want to risk overburning and potentially damage your drive? It's not worth it IMHO for an exta 20kb/s.

Interesting question I feel. If I remember well, Stomp recordNow max allow you to defined nb of sector and sizes, when burning a DVD I don't know if it can be use in some way. On the same topic, I like to burn audio CD with my DVD burner as it has CD-Text capability against my old X4 CD burner, and I did not suceed to overburn... I forget about that since your post, but I feel there is simply no overburn autorised by the pioneer firmware, probably giving an error(as you get from ASPI) when try to access sector 2,297,889. Perhaps a patched firm can do it, don't know, not a firmware specialist.

Interesting, as I also think it is a firmware issue with the Pioneer as Klona suggests. Just as some CD-ROM burners can't go beyond 80 min, the Pioneer drive itself can't go beyond 4.37 GB. That is, to say, perhaps other non-Pioneer DVD-R/RW drives *can* overburn. I'm just trying to find out if it is a hard rule, or if some drive manufacturers will allow us to 'risk damaging' our drives just as many CD-R drive maufacturers will allow an overburn of an 80-min CDR. LB: I see your point about the diminishing returns of overburning a DVD, but my question was more academic. Is is physically possible to go >4.37 gb or is there a strict hardware reason why this is not permitted? And it is frustrating to spend hours encoding only to go over by only 5 or 10 MBs and not be able to burn the disc anyway without having to reencode again! And then there are those times when an extra 200 MB would make it possible to fit a movie-only backup of a dual-layer DVD without having to re-encode at all.