General frustration with DVD Media - any answers?

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  • Fozzy
    Junior Member
    Junior Member
    • Sep 2005
    • 10

    General frustration with DVD Media - any answers?

    Hi all
    Over the past couple of years I've experienced so many probelms with DVD media that I'm on the point of concluding that it's just unreliable and not worth the hassle.

    I'm wondering if anyone can give me any pointers as to where I'm going wrong?

    To start off with, i was burning movies (i.e. backups) and my own DV camera stuff, but I realise now I had chosen poor quality media. Many skipped, many wouldn't read at all in PC DVD drive etc. I had master copies of the most important stuff but lost some due to reading problems.

    I then read up on this. Guides such as the one on nomorecoasters.com pointed me to better quality media. So i spent money on good quality Verbatim Taiyo Yuden disks, rated very highly, and much more expensive.
    I spent money and also a great deal of time and effort getting the other discs to read bit by bit in various drives, eventually being able to retrieve data from most of them. it had taken many hours to retrieve them.

    After this effort (6-8 months ago) i then thought I'd have few if any more problems.

    I was wrong.

    Here are my symptoms:
    I have two DVD burning drives on my PC : one is an LG GSA4167B (This has been put in SINCE the first lot of problems)

    the other is an NEC ND2510A, and has been in since day 1.

    The main PC has also been changed i.e. there a very few constants in these problems.

    My expereinces are:
    DVDs seem to burn OK and start off readable. I always check them by putting them in DVD player and skipping through each chapter. Also check they are readable in PC drive.

    However :
    when I go to use them (this will not always be straight away, may be weeks or months til i want to watch again), the first half-hour or so of a movie seems to play OK, then starts freezing and skipping. Cleaning the drive doesn't help. The disk itself will have become very hot (I presume due to trying to read again and again). This is NOT confined to one DVD player, in fact I usually try them on several. My main one is a SumVision but we also have an older Samsung and a newer Mustek player which is also DivX.

    When the DVD won't play it then seems to die forever. I can't read it in a PC ('cannot read from source file or disk' OR 'cyclic redundancy error') and next try in a DVD player it seems to jump sooner than it did before (i.e. it's got worse).

    Extreemly frustrating as I've probably lost a lot of my collection and the home movie stuff will have to be recreated again from the original DV tapes. I'm glad i didn't really solely on the DVD copy.

    So... my summary is DVD media is far worse than VHS tape or CD!

    Can anyone help with what's going wrong?

    Thanks
  • benbryant
    Digital Video Master
    Digital Video Master
    • Aug 2005
    • 1375

    #2
    Using media with better quality is wonderful idea but you also need to see if your burner's firmware is up to date or not. Please post the burning log so we can see what is going on with your system

    Regards

    Comment

    • Chewy
      Super Moderator
      • Nov 2003
      • 20967

      #3
      DVD burning is much harder, but after scanning and checking my collection of
      1/2 to 2 1/2 years old burns, I never found a premium disk that was bad.
      You are generalizing a lot. The LG and dvdshrink should be able to recover
      the majority of your data. I have tested and found most problems with better media to be caused by burning too fast. Two years ago I was using a plextor drive that would burn 4x media at 8x, with good media it was OK, but with poor media it's a definite issue. My 3 different toshiba standalones have played even the worst disks.

      Comment

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