I'm looking into buying a DVD recordable drive. I already know which one, the Sony DRU500A because it's the only drive to support all current "standards".

The problem is that I don't know which standard is the best. With which standard will I get best results if I want to use the disks in my living-room DVD player ? I know one format works better with older DVD players, but I don't know wich one.
Also I want to use it for making backups of my system. Also here : which disks to use? DVD-R(W) or DVD+R(W)? Or will both formats be easily read by all DVD-ROM drives in other PC's?
Then for creating the disks : the way I see it, the drive always uses the same writing software (I'll probably use Nero), wether I use DVD + or - only depends on the media that I put into the drive. Is this correct ? Or do I need different writing software for different media ?

Thank heavens for "standards" !