ongoing burning problems - aaarrrghh!!!

[nick_harambee]

hello,

i have been the proud owner of a LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-1633S vBSOK drive for the past month. initially the problems that i had with the dvds that i burnt were that there were glitches in the latter part of the movie. small 'jitters' in the audio/video playback. i initially thought that this might be an issue with preprocessing with dvd shrink and then using dvd-rb to compress, but there wasn't any problem with the playback from the compressed movie files on my laptop, so i then presumed it was a burning issue. i switched to creating ISOs and burning using DVD decrypter (a 4x) instead of using Nero as this was recommended to me by someone on this forum. Then I had 5 perfect backups.

Now though two of the recent DVDs that i have backed up have had read problems. rather than a series of small glitches i am tending to get one part of the movie where my drive has trouble reading the disc. interesting when i try to play the DVD on another drive or on a set top player, i cannot recreate the read problem. I have then used Nero CD-DVD Speed to check the discs, and i am getting either one or a series of spikes in the PI Failures graph at the point where the DVD had a read error. I have run the scan disc feature of nero cd-dvd speed, and it found a small part of one dvd unreadable, but on the other, whilst the program slowed down when it was trying to read the problem area, it stated that the disc was 100% readable. so there is an inconsistency here.

i have run tests on the Lite-On Drive using Nero CD-DVD speed and got the following results:

speed: 3.8 X CAV (5.64 X average)
Random Seek: 101 ms
1/3 Seek: 113 ms
Full Seek: 177 ms
CPU usage at 1X: 15%
CPU usage at 2X: 25%
CPU usage at 4X: 48%
Interface burst rate: 11 MB/sec (11484 KB/sec)
Spin-up time: 1.94 seconds
Spin-down time: 1.87 seconds
Eject time: 0.93 seconds
Load time: 1.10 seconds
Recognition time: 13.59 seconds

i have created a data disc using the taiyo yuden DVD-Rs (8x) that i am using (which i have been told are good quality) and then ran a disc quality test. here are the results:

PI Errors: Average: 248.21, Maximum: 429
PI Failures: Average: 0.25, Maximum: 16
Quality Score: 35

The '16' was a single spike around a third of the way through the disc.

i would be grateful if someone could comment on these results as i am not too sure how to interpret them.

another puzzling thing is that i burnt an ISO of a movie with DVD decrypter (@ 4x), and verified the burn, and all the results came back fine. then i tested it using nero speed and the scan disc results were fine. then i did a disc quality test and got the following results:

PI Errors: Average: 82.13, Maximum: 155
PI Failures: Average: 0.35, Maximum: 9
Quality Score: 57

then i printed onto the disc using tdk thermal printer, and tested it again (i am trying to eliminate all possible reasons for the problem). the scan disc results were once again fine, but with the disc quality test i got the following results:

PI Errors: Average: 179.35, Maximum: 376
PI Failures: Average: 0.38, Maximum: 22
Quality Score: 20

it seems to me incredible that i would get such different results for the same disc. is this a result of printing onto the disc?? can the disc quality test be used in this way??

if anyone could throw any light on any of this i would be very grateful

thanks

nick.

[Paulcat]

I had a movie that was literally unreadable in my set top player. I used dvd shrink (with no compression) to copy it to my HD and put it onto a new disc, where it worked fine.

If you can swing it, try a couple of different brands and see if it makes a difference. The problem is, most stuff plays brilliantly on the hard drive so it's really difficult to tell if there is going to be a problem later..

I also fixed a problem with my burner not recognizing dvds or cds when inserted...I replaced by old IDE cable with an 80 wire cable, it works just fine now.