CDRecordables=Junk

[Mnemonic]

Just got my order today, Grabbed one off the stack bruned it, no problem, stuck it in my panasonic DVD-RV26 (wich has played every DVD-R/RW i have bought from meritline. Even DVD-PRO) And half way through the movie pixelation/soundskipping/etc etc etc etc. This did NOT show up during burn, only when i tried to play the disk, and this was THE FIRST ONE I TRIED! If you have had good luck there, since then they have went to $hit! They better give me a REFUND or i will dispute on my card!

[Doom9]

ok.. this has been going on for too long so I can no longer look over it.

Let me tell you something about my experiences with the first CD burner I got. Back in April '99 I got a brand new Yamaha 4/4/16 burner... fastest model you could get at that point. Many of my friends already did have a CD burner way before that but somehow I managed to convince them that a ZIP drive isn't such a bad thing and so I could participate in fileswapping.. but eventually even 100MB ZIP discs got too small.. and having 30+ of them for an MP3 collection just took up too much space so I did have to get a burner. Having gotten a rather expensive burner I wanted not to spend too much money on blanks. While my friends often picked up major brand CDs at local computer stores I went to a large consumer electronics store and picked up a couple of 10 packs of noname disc... actually they had a name but nobody had ever heard of the company. I paid at least 0.5$ less per disc as my friends but the results were mixed... most of them worked, some didn't. And of course, in the time of W98 you had to leave your computer alone while you were burning (to the people still using that piece of shit OS... upgrade.. you don't know what you're missing... W2K/XP is lightyears ahead) and every now and then a disc got toasted thanks to buffer underruns. Of course I burned at the maximum possible speed... Put these discs into a PC and you didn't really have any problems.. but my friends who, after my rather positive experiences for PC based stuff, got the same discs and tried to create audio CDs from their MP3 selection did have a lot more problems... depending on the device they tried on nothing would work. That was 3 years ago. Even then, despite CD-R already having become a rather common good there were still a lot of problems.. especially when it comes to standalone devices. Maybe you've had a burner even before that point.. then I'm sure you recall all the compatibility problems you ran into, even when using high quality burnerns and expensive major brand media.. there were a lot of audio CD players that refused the disc. Hell.. even some CD-ROMs refused to read CD-Rs though as long as you stayed in the PC world problems were much less widespread.
So... in '99 we had: no-name or el cheapo brands have a higher fail rate than brand media... and when burning for standalone applications the problems multiply.. the worst combination is high burning speed, cheap media and CD players having a specialized CD reading tract (these days especially for cheaper asian brands DVD players use DVD-ROMs.. they're much more forgiving when it comes to error than what's being used in many major brand player).

fast forward to today... DVD-R, which becoming more and more affordable ($299 for the Vivavstar burner is the lowest I've seen so far) it's far from being a mainstream application. Burning programs are more often than not problematic (Pioneer even halted A04 shipment to replace one particularly problematic program the burner came bundled with) and discs are expensive. It's pretty hard to find to find any major brand blank for a price below $5. But there are a few companies that sell unbranded discs for below $2, which certainly is a great price. However, recall the early burning days... cheap media = more problems, and outside the PC the problems increase almost exponentially. So.. maybe you know that I'm supposed to get a burner myself soon (present from a reader though I'm starting to doubt his commitment). So.. I got myself a couple of blanks.. ordered 35 from Meritline... now I've heard mixed things about them myself.. so I got 10 of the 3 el'cheapo offers they have and 5 rewritables. Let's see how they perform... if I run into problems with one disc on a standalone I might just use the rest as data storage rather than for movies. In fact if the blanks are rather error prone chances that my PC will still read them is much higher than of a standalone reading them properly. Have you had a look at the player compatibility list? Almost everybody there is using major brand discs and there's not many problems... If you count two and two together, coupled with a litte experience from the CD-R age you know what that means..

You DO take a risk using generic noname DVD-Rs, especially when you want to put them in a standalone. You may be lucky and never run into any major problems, or you may get very unlucky and can throw away 90% of your disc. Though I bet the throw away rate wouldn't be 90% if you used these discs for data storage and only on PCs.

Now, please don't abuse this forum as a customer feedback forum for cdrecordable, meritline, etc. If you're not satisfied with their discs you should contact the company.. and by all means set up a www.genericdvdrssuck.com with a forum where every unsatisfied customer can share his/her experiences with the rest of the world.. but that's not the focus of this forum.. so please let us get back to business.

and on a last note.. about a year after I got my burner I got a 12x plex.. and combined with W2K my burning problems were almost gone.. I was still using very cheap blanks which worked just fine, but later I found out that after about a year they could hardly be read anymore. I then started using Kodaks which have proven to be rather time resistend and about a year ago I discovered another cheap brand: SmartBuy. I've used them ever since, burned at least 200 CDs (12x, 16x and 24x models, all on a 12x and a 24x plex).. and besides discs that I ruined (tried to overburn too much) I hardly had any failure and even my oldest discs can still be read. Though I doubt I'd be so successful if I tried to make audio CDs, especially when burning at 24x. Even today if you burn something destined to be played outside a PC there's still an exponential increase of possible problems.. you may know that from personal experience.. or look at all the problem the SVCD folks are having... the numbers speak for themselves.

[Mnemonic]

FYI it also wont read on the PC in either the burner or the Creative 16x i have. Doom9 the point i was making is that of generic media, wich i have bought other brand (Meritline dvd-pro) and had very good success, this media is no good, and people would be making a mistake to try it like i did.