Newbie question about optical disc's and burners

[punchy71]

Greetings,
I am a bit confused on which kind of optical disc technologies are currently available on store shelves. Can the kind of optical discs that you can re-write to still be bought from brick and mortar store shelves and if so what are they called? How many times can you re-use them before they're spent? I have never used these kind of discs myself but I have heard about them in the past. I have always used the kind of optical discs that you burn your data onto one time and it is permanent. Not sure what this kind is called really. Like I said, I'm a bit confused.
Also; I went into a brick-and-mortar store today and noticed new portable Blue-Ray/DVD writers. However, the store did not offer any blank Blue-Ray disc's to write to. So I was thinking possibly you can only watch Blue-Ray movies on these portable writers and not burn Blue-Ray discs with them, only DVD's, is that correct?

Thanks

 

[johnb35]

CDR disks can only be burnt once and thats it.

CDRW disks can be burnt many times over.

Same way for the DVDR disks and the DVDRW disks.

R means once and RW means rewritable. Most cd burning programs have the option to erase rw disks for reuse.

And yes, you can buy both in electronic stores, walmart, bestbuy etc...

You must have blu ray burner to view or burn blu rays.