Gary, there are times where a manufacturer's official position is that a component will not play CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, etc. and then people find some of these discs actually do work. It could be that based on the age of the component, the '09 would not have been designed to play DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs, but that does not mean that Pioneer has tested these discs in the player. I once had a Sony ES CD changer at a time when Sony's official position was that they did not guarantee compatibility with CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Despite this, I found that the player handled any CD-R and CD-RW I threw at it flawlessly.