Muzman on 23/9/2008 at 00:22
A little update, since I know you're all waiting with breath more baited than when finding out who shot J.R.
My mum's package deal box came with an LG dvd burner as well , which she never uses. So I went around there to try out these recalcitrant disks and whadaya know, they work fine. So swapped the drives and now I've got hers.
The interesting bit is reading the manufacture dates; mine is Jun '06, mum's is Aug '05. hmmm
No doubt the next part of this story is using all of these disks, buying a new set, finding they don't work for me now and having to swap the drives back again.
Fafhrd on 23/9/2008 at 02:09
Sometimes drives just crap out weirdly. It might be something like a lens misalignment that's freaking out over a manufacturing defect in the discs that a straight lens wouldn't notice.
A year or so ago I had a DVD burner just up and decide not to read or write CDs anymore, and wouldn't even detect them in the drive.
CaptSyn on 25/9/2008 at 14:50
Verbatim is actually high quality media, they have been for many years now, even back when they made floppies. I use +r 8x from Sam's Club without any trouble. I used to use Ritek Ridata +R 8x, but I got tired of having to order it and pay shipping.
BTW, if you use your burned media in stand-alone players, you really should use +R as it's more widely supported.
I'd say your burner is dying. The chances of having an entire spindle of bad media are pretty slim.
Why do you want a blu-ray burner anyway? Have you seen the price of those things? $220 for a LiteOn brand at Newegg. The prices go up from there.
Not to mention the media. $12 per disc is the cheapest I've seen.
The price of the burners will come down I'm sure, but the media won't drop much if at all. Take a look at dual layer dvds, they haven't gotten any cheaper in the last few years.
Muzman on 27/9/2008 at 03:52
I remember paying that much for a CD burner back in the day (let me tell you about my knees when it rains, ho boy). Hard drive prices being what they are the demand for bluray burners is probably a bit low and Sony are happy for it to be fairly uncommon. But I'm interested in these things, what can I say.
I can't remember why exactly but there were terrible problems with +Rs back at school. Everyone switched and swore by -Rs from then on and never had a worry and I concur. I haven't seen a DVD player that didn't support everything under the sun for five years. That may be different elsewhere.
baeuchlein on 28/9/2008 at 23:00
I bought a DVD writer in 2005, when both CD writers I owned failed almost simultaneously. Only later I found out that this burner was the first one this company ever built, and that they did it with another company which manufactured CD drives several years ago - all of them we bought failed within two years. Two bad omens.
The DVD writer was the first one the company built, and one could see that. Although it did write DVDs reliably in the end, it took me some time to find the settings required for that. And there were other strange things happening with this drive, but these were mere annoyances.
I used DVDs from various manufacturers over the next year, and almost all gave results in the range from "okay" to "satisfactory". Then I began buying the local supermarket's DVDs. DVD+R, DVD-R, and still the burner would write to them reliably, as long as one kept the writing speed at 4x or below.
The problem with the supermarket's brand of DVDs was that it was not really any known brand, but these were relabelled media from the "real" manufacturers. One day, the '"real" manufacturer changed, but the appearance of the DVDs' box and the writings on that did not change. I only recognized that when several attempts to burn DVD+Rs failed, and the writing speed was different from what I selected. That was because suddenly, the DVD writing program could not set a burning speed anymore with the media from the newer manufacturer, and then the writer selected the speed on its own - and selected maximum speed, which was not 4x (which I selected), and not 8x (the maximum for the DVD+R media from the former manufacturer), but 16x. That was the recorder's maximum speed (and the maximum speed allowed by the media descriptor as well), but nearly every tester from these days wrote that it was not safe to record at that speed with this recorder.
I switched to the DVD-Rs from this supermarket, then, and although the real manufacturer for these disks has changed as well over the years, I have not had any problem writing to those.
I have used several media from varoius other manufacturers in the meantime, and there is no preferred kind (+R versus -R) of media type with my recorder. The supermarket's +R media are the only ones which gave me big trouble. Now I know why these are cheaper... :tsktsk:
With double layer (DL) media, however, the situation is different again. The recorder cannot write to DVD-R DL (at least the manufacturer says so, and no one - including myself - wanted to find out whether that's true), so +R is the only thing possible with DL media. Unfortunately, the writer cannot write these as reliably as single layer media, and my DVD player does not read the five or six DVD+R DL I wrote either. Therefore, I have given up the idea of using this media type.
So, we learn the following of all this:
* Cheap media may cause problems, or maybe not.
* Select your writing speed wisely - don't go too fast.
* Everything is possible, especially when the "real" manufacturer of you preferred brand changes.
* If anything goes wrong, verify all of the above.
* If nothing else helps, changing the drive's firmware may help you (but it may not help you either... OK, that's another story.).
Such are the pitfalls of DVD writing.:grr:
CaptSyn on 29/9/2008 at 10:17
Dual layer media is shaky at best. Sure the burners are cheap in price and good quality, but the media is crap, no matter the brand. Not to mention way overpriced considering how long it's been on the market. As a result, I've never bothered with DL media.
I've had several burners over the years, both cd and dvd. I still have my last 2 cd burners (TDK VeloCD in 32x and 52x), my last dvd burner (Plextor PX-708A) and they all still work perfectly. They all burn excellent at full speed on any media I've thrown at them, even the cheap crap. Unless a disc is bad right off the spindle, of course. I don't think I've ever had to lower the burn speed.
The media I've had the most trouble with over the years was cd-rw media, several brands. These simply failed to burn successfully most of the time, and when they did burn successfully, they usually couldn't be read again.
Fuji made some good cd-rw media though. I only have one of those and it's reserved for my unattended XP installs. It's been burned countless times and shows no sign of going bad. I only have it cause I stole it from my Dad.
Sony, TDK, and Durabrand were simply the best cd-r media I've ever found, with Durabrand at the top of the list simply for being the cheapest, and was available only at Walmart. $19.99 for a 100 spindle. Sadly, those bastards quit carrying it a few years ago. I use them in my car stereo for mp3 cds and for the occassional tool, like Acronis or ERD. I've still got about 50 blanks.
Memorex media of any type I've found to be trash. I've had maybe 5 discs out of 50 not go bad sitting in jewel cases in a dark room on a shelf.
As for dvd media, I did some research when I got my Plextor and found that Ritek makes some kick ass media, and it was also on Plextor's recommended list. I used Ritek 8x dvd+r for ages and very rarely had a bad disc. I finally got tired of having to order it online and pay shipping when I could get quality Verbatim media cheaper locally.
I did have some Ritek 4x dvd-r at one time, and it was solid media too.
I now use a LiteOn LH-20A1S sata burner with my Verbatim 8x dvd+r media and still don't have any problems. I also use Ritek 4x dvd+rw media. I got 10 discs free on one of my last online orders. Those bad boys are rock solid.
On a the media side, most people don't know that there's only a handful of optical media factories in the world, all in southeast Asia and Japan and none of them are owned by the brand name companies you see on the labels, unless you get the manufacturer's own media.
Ritek and Tayo Yuden are just two of those manufacturers.
This is a market that is entirely outsourced. Media is made based entirely on the buyer's specs, with those buyers being the brand name companies.
Also, any given make/model of media can be made at any factory. It all depends on which factory is offering the cheapest price at a given time.
And you usually can't tell the difference by looking at the package label or the discs themselves. You have to use something like Nero InfoTool to find the info.
Sometimes a package might say, "Made in Japan." If so, it's highly likely that it's made by Tayo Yuden, which is supposed to be high end stuff when made to their own specs.
Most Fuji and Maxell media are TY, but are not necessarily made to TY's specs. Personally, I avoid Maxell media. What I've had has been junk.
The point is if you use quality hardware and quality media, you won't have problems.
