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I want to produce many playable DVDs using a few burners (setting up a computer lab with each computer having an image of the same)

I have close to no budget for this and am curious if a standard CD (the kind that have around 700mb) can be formatted as a DVD, and then played in standard DVD players?

Obviously it would have to be a short and or low bitrate encoded video.

But will this work?

(This is based on the idea that bulk CDs being an older technology can be obtained in bulk for less money than the same of DVD-5s)

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    Easy enough to try, right? Create the DVD structure on a hard drive and copy it to the CD. It'll probably depend on the player though.
    – Jim Mack
    Apr 10, 2015 at 22:17
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    Are you sure blank CDs are actually cheaper? Better check, because they're both mature techs, and spreading dye on a piece of plastic is pretty much the same whether it's a dvd+r or a cd-r. Also, the real question is player support for DVD-VIDEO on a CDR. Making a set of .VOBs holding your video and menus and putting them in a disc image shouldn't be a problem (except for the quality at low bitrate problem), regardless of size.
    – Peter Cordes
    Apr 11, 2015 at 10:46

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If you're authoring DVDs to be played on DVD players, then this won't work. I checked it out way back when there was a significant price difference between CD and DVD media.

If the end users are all going to be playing on computers you could send them instructions on how to open the DVD media folders, but realistically what you'd save (if anything) on media costs would be eaten up in time spent answering queries from disgruntled users who can't get it to play.

Just for reference - the first site I saw when I searched for "bulk DVD CD media" has 100 DVDs for $19.90 and 100 CDs for $18.90. So the difference in price is 1¢ per disk.

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