How to test quality/compatibility of a media?

[klona]

The purpose here is to avoid all other mistake that can occurs when authoring a DVD, and focus only on burning issues.

Here is the process suggested, already discussed in this forum, and from an idea mainly from Doom9, and comments are welcome. At the end of the discussion, I hope we will have a nice process that everybody can use to report bad/good media here.

1/ Find a DVD5 original DVD
2/ Rip it with DVD Decrypter, in ISO mode
3/ Burn it with DVD Decrypter, mode1 of course, but X1 not MAX
4/ Rip again with DVD Decrypter to check read errors, but NOT in your burner, as burner can succeed even with crap DVDR. Do it in a DVD reader only like Pioneer 116 or whatever
5/ A burn is I/O successful if you get of course 0 errors, but also 0 retry
6/ Compatibility issues are not handled at this point, so test the media in your standalone, PS2, Xbox whatever. And the only way to check really for trouble, is to watch the whole movie, then play with next/previous track and play with menus.


Note : no I/O error does not mean it will work in your standalone, but I/O errors means you willsurely have trouble with your standalone.

[alexnoe]

If you find a non-CSS dvd5 original, it would be even better IMHO, since you can make a 1:1 copy then.

An example for such a disc is one of the Dragon Ball Z movies (German edition, with German+Japanese sound), but I can't remember which one.

[thxtof]

@klona, that's a great idea !

But may be you're asking for too much :)
For instance not all of us have a DVD-ROM...

So may be we should do:

1)2)3) OK
4) preferably in a DVD-ROM, in the burner otherwise -- in my case even the burner could not read the crappy DVD-Rs. We just need to mention what we used.
5) OK
6) watching the entire movie is may be too constaining. I noticed that everytime a DVD-R is bad, it's after 1h, and it's getting worse and worse after that. In my experience, jumping quickly from chapter to chapter, and playing the last 30-20mns always worked to find bad media.

[trekkerj]

I don't have a DVD-ROM drive either (at least not anymore). I also put the disc in and check the last several chapters, like you described.

Re-reading the disc in the burner is still not a bad idea. If you et zero read errors, then at least at some point in the future, if you run into a problem, you can re-rip the disc and re-burn in onto better media.

[Tr0LL]

or you can rip it to iso as stated, then burn it with Stomp Recordnow MAX (or Nero) and use the verify option as it does exactly what ripping it back to the hard drive would do.

This method actually compares the original file with the file on the burned DVD after it's been burnt. Nero has this option also (I'm not sure if it has it with image burning, but if you select files then it does)...

[kheops]

hi,

here is what i do to verify that my dvdr was correctly burned (doesn't mean at all that it will work in a standalone, it's ok)

once i have my vobs and ifos files in the VIDEO_TS folder i create a sfv file for them (with wincommander but winsfv is a tiny tool for that task), i let this svf in the VIDEO_TS folder (i don't think it's a problem please tell me if i should put it somewhere else)

i burn the dvdr (with rnm 4.1) NOT using the verify option to make the burner work the less as possible
once burned i insert the dvdr in my dvdrom reader (pioneer 103s) then verify the burned files checking the sfv file (quicksfv for this task)

+++

[Suade907]

Hi all I actually have a pioneer 116 so I'll try this tonight. I'll use the Ritek DVD+R media to test it. And I will test it on something like Peter Pan return to never never land. I think that is a DVD5 and I already have it on my pc.

[klona]

Thx for your comments everybody !

Well, tools used have to be freewares, not commercial tools.
So forget nero, easy DVD etc... You cannot set up a process that forces people to buy a burning tool

If you do not have a DVDROM (what I easily understand), just skip step 4. But, I have a DVDROM116 and A A03 and 95% of crap discs I have can be read with no error, no retry from the Burner.
5 remaining percent have between 10 to 100 retries, but no error

On DVD116, theses same discs gives thousand of retries (need to click retry lots of times) and then finaly just stay stucked at around 4 Gb.
I have about 50 crap discs from various brand.

So I insist, rips with the burner means nothing.(or verify from nero for the same reason) But I agree, it's nice to be able to get back your data using the burner. But it's not the goal here. Goal is to test "burning" and that only.

I think about a test image that people can download, but forget about that:

Image has to small enough to be download.
So it must be highly compressed, so repeat video like a still image
I don't even know if This gives a high compression or not. More, image must be 4700000000 , and I cannot imagine someone watching a still for 2 hours, waiting for a small pixelisation or something...

So I think a DVD5 is the best. Everybody can have access to a DVD5 if he look a bit for.

[Suade907]

Ritek media DVD+r
Here is my follow up for now. I wasn't able to do exactly the method you spoke of but here is what I did do.

I ripped Peter Pan return to never never land using DVD Decryptor. after that I used IFO edit to create new ifo's and strip all the streams except the main dolby digital and also kept the english subtitles. I then selected all the vob id's because I still am unsure how to determine which ones to keep. after ifo was done I reloaded the new video_ts ifo (me think) adn then ran get vts sectors and also did the region free but I don't think it did anything for that. I then proceded to create a image file within Ifo edit and then used dvd decryptor to burn the image to my Ritek DVD+R at a 1x speed. At first the DVD would not work at all in any dvd players. I did some reading on this and in this and other forums and have come to the conclusion that DVD Decryptor did not finalize the dvd. So upon reading more someone had a tip to finalize it using nero. So I did it and it now works fine in all my DVD payers, Playstation 2, Xbox, and a sony 5 disc stand alone unit. I used my other pc to try to decrpyt the dvd using my Pioneer DVD-116 and it did so without any errors.

I know that this is not the exact technique but I had this disk lying around so it was a quick and easy test. I hope this helps. So far I've been having good luck with my Ritek media from supermediastore.com except for the fact that dvd decryptor won't finalize my dvd's. But the work around seems to work well.