what media is the best?

[redrose55]

I am using ridata 8x dvd-r and have had great success. But i am having trouble burning on some of them . " hardware error ,underburn "comes up on some not all of them. I have a pioneer 108 burner.

[CWR03]

Your choice of media is not as important as the burning speed. I primarily use cheap 8X media in a 16X burner, and I burn at 4X. Many hundreds of burns later and I have had no burn failures, and I test each disc in a separate drive. Also there is a forum rule #12 that states "Do not ask 'what's best' because this question cannot be answered objectively."

[neuron2]

According to forum rule 12, there is no "best". Please read and follow forum rules. Thank you.
:readrule:

[redrose55]

I am sooooooo sorry for asking what's best , i forgot. I am still kind of new at this..

How do i test my disk in another drive? is this question ok?? haha

[mg262]

You could start with this:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=36085

and the other stickies on that subforum. I have the same burner that you do and I use Taiyo Yuden media, which is of very high quality. (You have to be careful to get this from a reputable suppliers there's a lot of fake media around that pretends to be Taiyo Yuden.) I've never had any problems with it. It is more expensive than most but on the whole I don't see the point in spending half as much on each disc and then having half of them fail in (say) five years time. But I burn relatively low volume and I intend to keep what I burn for a long time, so that's a sensible strategy.

Incidentally, this illustrates why "best" is ill-defined... there's a trade-off between quality and cost; or perhaps even between probability of burn failure, lifetime, burning speed and cost. Any answer is going to be a trade-off between those. By the way, I'm far from being an expert on this, so don't take e.g. the five years figure above to be anything concrete...

One last thing, which is that I remember reading that burning at lower speeds may not necessarily result in a longer lifetime, depending on the media and other factors... as I said I am not an expert, but it's something you might want to check up on before burning at very low speeds.

[bongoman31]

Another good rule for shopping media; made in Japan is generally better than Taiwan. Look at fine print on label.

[CWR03]

One last thing, which is that I remember reading that burning at lower speeds may not necessarily result in a longer lifetime, depending on the media and other factors... as I said I am not an expert, but it's something you might want to check up on before burning at very low speeds.

That's probably true, and it wasn't something I had considered when answering the original question. Certainly better media will have a better shelf life, but simply from a burning standpoint even the cheapest stuff will work, just not always at its highest burn speed. I have burned at 8X with the cheap 8X media I use and it always performs well in my own drives during playback, but I have more faith in 4x and I can see faster seek times with data discs.

As far as testing, I'll load the disc in a different drive from the burner and play each file and skip around a little to make sure it seeks quickly each time. The rare times I've had a bad burn the file either wouldn't play at all or it would hang or crash the player when I'd seek to the end. On few rare occasions I'd see the seek bar filling as if it were streaming but never fill completely, then the video wouldn't play beyond that point. Since I test before I delete the material from my drive, I never have to redo encodes.

[neuron2]

is this question ok?? Read the rules and you'll be able to figure that out for yourself. If you don't like the rules, that is another matter. You can take that up with Doom9.