Coasters Ahoy!

[Son Gokou]

Anyone need any? I've got a reliable supply coming in. Here's my story, after getting my burner up and running (OEM version of Sony DRU 500) I decided to back-up a DVD of mine. Now I didn't want to wait for some place to ship them to me, so I bought just one Maxell from a local place for $4. Now I know that's ridiculously high but this was just a test. I created an image in DVD decrypter, burned the image, DVD played in my JVC perfectly, a perfect duplicate right off the bat. Great! I thought, my first DVD and I've got a winning brand. So I went to some place called supermediastore.com where they had Maxells for more or less $1.80 a piece and I got a spindle pack of 50.

<tick tock tick tock>

My DVDs finally arrived a few days later, I boot one up and check it out in Nero infotool, it's a Maxell! Success! I didn't get cannon-balled with the infamous "Princo knockoffs" I've always heard about. So I do another DVD, same series actually, the exact same way. Finishes perfectly, I eject the disc, play it in WinDVD, and...NOTHING HAPPENS. Ok, don't panic, I loaded up PowerDVD XP, ahah! Good faithful PowerDVD will not fail me! I think PowerDVD is trying to tell me something, NO DISC INSERTED. Needless to say I was frustrated. Here I've heard Maxells are high quality, and already they have worked for me. So what is different about these? Only that they have no labels, Nero tells me they're Maxells. I tried downgrading DVD decrypter just incase upgrading to the new version had somehow caused a problem (only changed I've recently made). I now have two new places to set my drinks.

Oh something else I almost forgot to mention. A Princo Rewritable which came with the burner has perfectly written and played every movie I've tried. I have a bad feeling about this :/

Here are some answers to questions I think will be asked.

Yes my DVD burner can burn DVD+/- RW+/-

My player can play all of the above formats, in fact it can play VCDs and SVCDs also. In addition to having progressive scan, and being a JVC, having a sleek look, I thought it was a steal at $120.

So any tips? Thanks in advance.

[ravenone_2000]

Son,

The only advice I can say is that even with decent media, sometimes there are bad ones. I've used over 30 of my RitekG03's and 2 of them turned out to be coasters. No reason that I can tell. I used the same method and burners for most and even re-burned the same title on another G03 and it worked fine. :confused:

So, I would test a few more to see if it is a compatibility problem or just your luck of picking the 1 bad one out of the batch.

p.s. I even get an occasional G04 (4x media) disc that refuses to burn at 4X and will only burn at 2X. :angry:

Now, if you do find that none of them will work, you have 2 options. 1.) try and sell the rest to someone else, or 2.) make some nice curtains out of the DVDs. Imagine the pretty colors when the sun light hits them just right :D

[gooki]

Thanks ravenone_2000 for the tip about the curtains, I'd been looking for something to do with my 50 vivastar discs for some time.

But back to the topic at hand.

I highly recomend doing a DVD5 to DVDR copy, as that is generally the easiest way to test media quality.

[Arky]

Hey, Son Gokou, are you aware that the DRU-500 will refuse to read DVD-ROM content until you have allowed the drive to have its region set?

To do this, you need to put an original DVD movie (not a copy) into your drive, and allow either WinDVD or PowerDVD to access the disk, which should automatically set the region to that of the disk you inserted (don't forget that you can only alter this region a maximum of 5times, so you should make sure that the first disk you insert to regionalise the drive is the same region as the majority of your disks!).

After you have regionalised your drive, it should quite happily read all your DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs.

If you already know all of what I have written, and it didn't solve your problem, then fair enough - it probably IS a burning or a media issue, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.


Arky ;o)

[Son Gokou]

Thanks for the advice all, unfortunately it looks like bad media. I bought another couple of Maxells at $4 each, tried a dvd2one on one of them, a direct image copy on the other, both are perfect. I also ordered 10X Verbatims and 10X Riteks from rima.com, the Verbatims also work flawlessly, I've yet to try the Ritek. I'm gonna keep ordering from rima.com and will be avoiding supermediastore, not that it's necessarily their fault but just to be safe. :D

[andyg]

"...Maxells for more or less $1.80 a piece ..."

You know, Maxells is one of few of my favorite brands but the spindle of 50 I got was about $3 a piece (White printable top). And checking up prices that was the best deal I could find several weeks ago. Just wondering if they had a bad batch that's why it was cheap... ?
But a company with reputation like this would not try to sell lower than expected quality media, even for less money, would they?
By the way , I used about 25 of them so far, no problems yet.
I understand Maxell manufactures the media in Asia (Japan or Taiwan?) and in Mexico, wander if that has anything to do with it? Or the story with someone trying to sell cheap media as TDK brand.... .
Just wandering... .