Originally posted by: MeBeJedi
(Can't wait to see what you do at 100. )

Wow. Think about it... my 100th post... Whooah duuude... ya know, with some persistance, I bet I could reach that high...

I hope it's not marked by originaltrilogy offline for 3 days, and news stories about Jay savagely beating me.

Yeah, ok, the humor comes and then it goes. I think it just wandered off somewhere.

Hey, I think I'm going to steal... errr.. take inspiration from, the way you split up the quotes, Usenet-style.

Originally posted by: bad_karma24
I tend to just buy whatever I see first, I've been told by sales reps that brands don't matter. On the other hand, I've been given far worse advice by sales reps before... maybe its time I just stopped talking to them altogether.

Most sales reps are fuckun posers...

I chose both my burners because they can test for and count the 3 kinds of disc-errors (trivial, kinda-bad, and fatal), that show up before error-correction kicks in. I can tell you - manufacturer makes a humongous difference.

Online is great, there's reputable dealers who sell good discs in bulk, at a nice prices. I like Rima.com, myself, and there's other good ones. And, hey, no sales reps! :-)

You can use different utilities to check a thingy called the disc's MID - find out the manufacturer (if the MID is honest). I'll refer you over to CDFreaks again. Be sure to check out their media review forum.

I'll experiment with the firmaware too, though I think I updated mine when I first bought my laptop.

It usually comes out every couple of months or so. Its really worth a shot. Burner firmware updates usually do a lot more good that other device firmware updates.

Speaking of disc deterioration, is it possible to happen in a matter of months? I burned ADM's Hannibal edit a while back when it first came out on MySpleen, and burned it soon thereafter. I never actually watched the whole thing through, but checked several scenes throughout the movie and not a single problem. I played it back in full last night (well, almost in full) and 45 minutes in I got tons of errors and pixelization. I tried playing back on my computer, and it ran fine for a bit, then just locked up entirely. Copying didn't work because apparantly the disc data is in error.

Yep, months - yup, possible.

If the burn was marginal, the first blip of deterioration could send it over the edge. Every dvd-burn is loaded with correctable errors. If your drive doesn't like the media, or the media was crap, or a single disc was weak, it can be 100's of times worse. Errors like to clump together...

Music CDs don't have as much error-correction as data discs, so it's painfully obvious (earache) when there's deterioration. When an error finally leaks through the correction on a data disc, it's already in worse shape, but you might have a chance to salvage. (DVD-video is stored as data, but in a way that tells the machine that it's video). So by the time you see errors on DVDs, its time to jump into action.

Burned DVDs will self-destruct decades before retail discs - they use dyes within generic-pits instead of physically-embossed data-pits. So they're kinda like film... You may have 20~80 years on a good one, no one knows. But a low-quality disc is doomed.

Prolonged heat, humidity, and light exposure are deadly, good discs or bad.

I'd be doing the TransferRateTest on all of them, replacing any that show a slowdown. (Keep the orginals as backup). Of couse testing all of them takes forever, at maybe 8 minutes a pop, but, ya know, a few a day... And, even more impractical

, it helps to do 2 copies - you have far more than double the chance of recovering everything. Another idea would be to make pars of the Video_TS of each DVD - then store collections of those on data discs. But that idea probably wont catch on.

Rather annoying, especially since it's no longer up on MySpleen (and if it was, there probably would be hardly any seeders). I've heard of DVD Rescue programs, would those work in this situation, or will I have to trouble someone into providing a copy for me? (hint, hint

).

1) Since it's not a retail disc, it's not copy-protected. Try copying the disc contents to the hard drive. You'll find out right away, if there are unreadable spots. If you copy successfully, then ya can burn again. I'd use a Dos Window to copy from. "CD D:\" (or whatever the drive letter is for your DVD) "xcopy/s *.* c:\Dvdbackup". Windows tends to lock up for a long time if it can't read something (at least Win98). A Dos process is easier to kill. Unrelated tip: A Dos copy also loses the read-only, for you, which can be handy for data.

2) If you know people with other burners or DVD-ROM drives, try your copying your disc on theirs. My BenQ (fantastic burner) saw a scuffed cheapo DVD (that I paid for,

- nobody on this board, don't worry) as a blank CD!

But my LiteOn (Their burners are reputedly the best readers) read every byte without pausing for breath.

3) Serious data recovery - haven't tried it yet. (I know I'll have to some day). But IsoBuster has a good rep (if you pay the $30 for the full version). Even the free version will give you files. But, even with the registered version you might have to settle for errors in them. That's where my whacky par-idea comes in. Tip: Start your recovery before you go to bed, or leave for hours. :-)

MeBeJedi, I've been told (on this forum actually) that writing speed really doesn't matter, and that a slower speed will just mean that my information will get to the disc slower :/. Though since I'm usually out to lunch when I start a burn, I'll give this method a try and see what happens.

On the chance you're thinking of something I wrote in haste, about burning below rated speed, I went back & changed it a bit, for clairty and reduced inaccuracy. :-) Here's the OhMyGawdWillHeEverShutUp version.

You always get somewhat fewer errors at lower speeds - UNTIL you burn below the rated speed. The high-speed-disc's dye is designed to respond to the laser faster - so it's hard for the manufacturer to design a strategy that burns a fast-disc slowly. So the total error-rate usually actually increases.

But it helps some folks.

A big reason it works is CAV vs CLV. When you burn 6X or above, the burner has to shift speeds, you get clusters of errors at the shift points. At 4X, and below, the drive is burning at a steadily-increasing rate of speed. So, even if you have more total errors, they are spread out. And since your player is reading at 1X... (I'll qualify that, different drives might have to start shifting before or after 6X, I can't say).

It also depends on how good the burner is at learning from past burns, or learning on-the-fly. And it depends on how good a job the manufacturer did with figuring out how to burn different media (newer firmware helps there).

Jaiman, thanks for the info about the discs.

Yer welcome.

Hey, I got to babble about technical shit. It's a good day.