Now we can also burn our own DVDs. Sprinting down to the local mega-mart for a stack of blank CDs seems like a no-brainer, and it's quickly becoming so for DVDs. But the story doesn't actually end there.

Blank media still possess an air of mystery, at least to some people. When you buy a stack of shiny new platters packaged by Fujifilm, TDK Electronics, Ritek, Verbatim, Imation, Hewlett-Packard or another recognizable brand, you cannot count on the name that appears on the label to reveal the whole story. In fact, most of this blank media is manufactured by a short list of companies: India's Moser Baer, Japan's Ricoh and Taiyo Yuden, and Taiwan's CMC Magnetics, Prodisc Technology and Optodisc Technology.

Taiyo Yuden is the granddaddy of them all. Together with Sony and Philips, it invented recordable CD media in 1988. Today, these manufacturers produce a variety of product lines. Some are in-house formulations bought and resold under brand names, while other lines may be designed to the specifications of a particular vendor.

Just how much of each is out there "is an area where speculation takes hold more than fact," says Kevin Pieper, who maintains the resource site digitalFAQ.com. In Pieper's experience, the name brands "purchase the media being made by the manufacturers, and put their pretty little logo in it -- nothing more."