Ollie W. Holmes
27th August 2003, 22:52
I had a bad batch of rentals in the past two weeks that confounded my Panasonic LF-D321, LF-D311, and Pioneer DVR-A03 burners when they attempted to read the dvds. First, there was a dvd with a bullseye chip around 0.25" in diameter at the edge of the disc. The Pioneer went ca-chunk, cluck-cluck, and hung up during the load process. It then hung up Explorer, and Windows ME. The Panasonic took 15 secs to load up the disc, and the indicator light went from yellow to green to yellow. It also hung Explorer, but not as bad as the Pioneer. The outcome of all of this is that these burners seem to probe the dvd from the inside to the outside track. This sucks if you just want to rip the first titleset vobs. Second, there was another dvd where a former renter used Disc Doctor to resurface it. This caused a minor burn to the plastic, which makes laser focusing very difficult. It produces a haze on the transparent surface of the dvd. Neither the Pioneer or Pansonic burners could successfully load this dvd.
Now for the surprise. I tried the same pair of discs on a two cheapo dvd-rom drives. While they developed read errors toward the outer tracks, they did successfully rip enough files (using dvd decryptor) so I could burn these to a dvd-r blank. So the question is as follows. What makes a dvd-rom drive more robust than a burner in reading a glass-mastered dvd? Is it the laser spot size or the servo-tracking loop?
Now for the surprise. I tried the same pair of discs on a two cheapo dvd-rom drives. While they developed read errors toward the outer tracks, they did successfully rip enough files (using dvd decryptor) so I could burn these to a dvd-r blank. So the question is as follows. What makes a dvd-rom drive more robust than a burner in reading a glass-mastered dvd? Is it the laser spot size or the servo-tracking loop?