Discs intermittently not recognised by standalone

[Titanium48]

I have encountered a strange problem. The first 15 or so DVD backups I made played perfectly on my APEX AD-1200 standalone , but with my last 8 backups, sometimes I will insert the disc and the player will spin up for ~10s and then stop, displaying a "Loading" message on the Apex blue screen indefinitely. Other times I can insert the exact same disc and it will load and play perfectly (each disk has played perfectly at least once). This problem only occurs with more recent discs, my earlier backups still play reliably. I have made all of the backups using the following procedure:

1) Rip to hard drive using DVDDecryptor
2) Use titlesetblanker to blank out unwanted extras
3) Use DVDShrink to transcode to DVD-5 size, outputting to a titleset on the HD
4) Burn titleset to DVD-R using Liteon LDW451S

I use RecordNowDX in data disk mode to burn the titleset. I am running Windows 98 so can't use ISO mode without wasting 400MB on the disk (4 GB filesize limit). All the backups (always working and sometimes working) were burned onto the same media (Manuf. ID = Longten Tech, listed on Liteon's approved media list) at 4x. They all verified OK immediatly after burning and they all play reliably in my DVD-ROM using PowerDVD. I have tried burning at 2x but this has resulted in completely unreadable disks. Any ideas?

[Kedirekin]

How old is your Apex player?

I had an Apex 660A, and after about a year it started becoming more and more finicky about recognizing disks. The symptoms were similar to what you describe - sometimes recognized and played perfectly, sometimes spun for 10-90 seconds then said bad disk, sometimes simply locked up. And it was more coopertive at some times than others, even when the media was the same - no idea why.

Early on an eject and reload would be enough to fix things, and once recognized disks always played just fine. Eventually however it got to the point where I was ejecting 10, 20, 30 times and giving up, and eventually I gave up even trying.

[Dimmer]

I suggest you try different media. Maybe the last batch of DVD-R you bought was of a poor quality.

[Titanium48]

All of the media came from the same spindle of 50 - it seems strange that the first 15 discs would be consistently good, then the next 10 would be bad. Has this happened before?
My Apex player is about 18 months old, perhaps I'll try to find another standalone to test the disks with.

[Titanium48]

I finally figured out that my Apex player and my burner didn't like each other. I got a new burner (BenQ 1620) and I havn't had a problem since. My mother in law has my old lite-on and her standalone seems to like it much better.