I also have the Sony DRU500a burner. Awesome burner but I had to paint it black.

The dvd's I have burned all play fine on my PS2. You should have no problems. I even use cheap media at times.

As far as the dvd ripping and compressing.

I use DVD Decrypter to rip to iso format

then if bigger than 4.7

I use dvd2one 1.02 to compress down to 4.7gb. I really don't see any quality lost either.