Vista - Myths folk lore and tips on buring CDs and DVDs from Windows.

Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.

Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)

Not all media is created equal. In fact there are only a few companies
that make "good" media, and no surprise, they are located mostly in
the far East. Other "brands" cut corners, or are made by the handful
of companies that have their own factories, under license, but often
not with the same quality control or you may even be buying seconds
that the "name" brands have rejected. I have no proof of that, but I
do suspect it.

Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
page below you'll see a chart of WHO really makes the differnt brand
names.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

Myth #2 Quality media never fails

False! Having burned so many, I know better. ALL brands fail. If you
restate it to say quality brands fail far less often, then that is
correct. I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.

Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad

False. Sometimes you can. If you know what to look for. The process is
just too much a bother and far from accurate and you need to do it
BEFORE you burn the disc, and who bothers to do that? If you must,
carfully pick up a blank DVD by the edges making sure not to get any
fingerprints on the recording surface. Now under a powerful light,
slowly and carefully tilt the disc back and forth. You do this a few
hundred times your eyes get more apt to find very slight varations in
the color of the coating. My experience, if a blank has one or more of
these very minor and hard to see flaws somewhere on the disc and for
some odd reason it always seems to be nearer the edge, it almost
always will fail either during the burn process or when playing back
the data. What happened is this is a production flaw. The coating ever
so slightly got put on too thin and the encoding when you try to
"burn" the disc likely won't take or will be inaccurate.

Myth # 4 Burning speed matters

This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
into the encoding process. While you'll see some people suggesting you
should never burn higher than 1X speed, that's foke lore. My rule of
thumb is never burn higher than 50% of the rated speed of the media.
So if your media says 16X and you burner can burn at 16X, set the burn
speed to burn at 8X and you'll avoid most burning introduced errors.

Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
far ahead and the encoder may drop bits, often in the audio track
which is more forgiving then the video tracks. If taken to extremes,
this can result in a ruined burn where the disc simply won't play or
gets rejected during the burn process or once you try to play the disc
back it will skip, squeal and cause all kinds of grief since every DVD
player has build in circuity that attempts to read the audio enough to
where it can play it if some bits got dropped. The problem is the
process is far from accurate. So to avoid it, help your burner out,
run it at no faster than half speed when burning a disc.

The actual encoding of the DVD, not any recompression phase if needed
depending on software you use isn't that impacted by dropping the burn
speed down. I typically "burn" a 4.7 GB disc taking 99% of the disc's
surface in under 6 minues running at half the speed my LG burner can
run the format at.

Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista

Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
that comes with the necessary codecs.

Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?

From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
Again, hardly worth the trouble. Better to use a DVD player, included
with most DVD burning suites. See above. This way you get to see
chapters and play the DVD off your computer like you would off a set
top DVD player.

You may be successful with this method. Place the DVD you want to play
in your computer, wait till it spins up. If auto play is enabled on
your system cancel it and go to Explorer, find your CD/DVD player, and
click to open the DVD you have inserted.

You should see a video folder with several files inside. Double click
on any VOB file and see if it plays. If Vista finds a codec it should
play the file with any associated application that understands .VOB.

If you don't have any, many players do understand the format, but
you'll also need need to download a MPEG-2 codec. One free player that
easily plays DVD VOB files is called VLC Media Player. The downside is
using this method you only can play one DVD file at a time, no menu
features to click on, so a true DVD player is better.

Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?

If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
a reduced frame size and see if that helps.

For not playing at all or really playing poorly also check if you have
MPEG-2 codec conflicts. One such tool is called Microsoft XP Video
Decoder checkup Utility. It does work in Vista. A free download. Many
other tools like Video Inspector and GSpot also free.

Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.

WAY common. DVDs can be very fickle. I've burned many a DVD that plays
fine on the computer that created it, but refuses to play on any other
computer. I've also had some DVDs play fine on some DVD set top player
and act up or totally refuse to play on others.

Two main culprits. The media's coating or burned at too high a
bitrate.

The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings on the
bottom business end. The simple fact is some DVD players don't do that
great a job and the laser trying to read the disc has trouble with the
laser beam bouncing off the disc surface which may be either too shiny
or not shiny enough. Newer players have better, often multiple lasers
that work at different wave lengths that solve this problem.

The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
bitrate to maximum. Not only is this wasteful, meaning you'll be able
to put less material on the DVD, it causes problems for some players
trying to keep up with the higher bitrate stream. They show this by
sputtering, skipping, audio getting out of sync an other annoying
stuff.

Solution, burn at a lower and ideally at a variable bit rate as
opposed to a high constant bitrate.

Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?

Because they're made differently. Commerical DVDs you buy in the store
go through a totally different process. The data is PRESSED into the
media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
misleading, is you "burn" the DVD. Actually, what really happens is
like when writing to a hard drive the bits are simply wrote to the
media. Obviously you can't expect some cheesy little DVD burner that
now costs under a $100 often way under, to do as good a job as some
commerical process where many DVDs are pressed in one operation on
machines that cost millions.

Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.

Actually they can. Operative word again is CAN, not always will.
This should be your last restort. The fact is the media surface of
both CDs and DVDs can easily be damaged with little scratches, nicks,
and oil from fingerprints, etc.. This will cause the disc
to act up. How or if any repair attempt works depends on the extent of
the damage and where on the disc it is. Gnerally, If you are making
your own CDs and DVDs, arrage your media so the most important to you
is first and it should get burned on the inner most tracks which are
subject to the least external damage.

Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes. When
transferring my extensive music collection to Mp3 files I had one
original and not replaceable disc that no matter what I couldn't read
fully from. Windows would try and fail over and over. Looking close at
the disc, it did have several pretty nasty scratches which probably
were the issue. Putting this disc through a electric model of a DVD
disc cleaner that does two passes, first repair, then polish, while it
didn't totally remove the scratch, it did greatly reduce it and bingo,
I then could transfer the files and make Mp3 files from it.

interesting read... I agree with you on most things since I have seen
similar results...

one time I backed up some data on the most expensive brand of dvd I could
find thinking that it would be better.. terrified I found out that the media
after some years was destroyed and there was no way I could recover and read
the data.... other chepo dvds retained the information fine...

Now for very important stuff I double backup things and leave copies on hard
drives as well.. lol



"Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
news:qokf139ta7nevcu7m60q5uq534p3f638mv@4ax.com...
> Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
> professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
> grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.
>
> Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)
>
> Not all media is created equal. In fact there are only a few companies
> that make "good" media, and no surprise, they are located mostly in
> the far East. Other "brands" cut corners, or are made by the handful
> of companies that have their own factories, under license, but often
> not with the same quality control or you may even be buying seconds
> that the "name" brands have rejected. I have no proof of that, but I
> do suspect it.
>
> Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
> media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
> page below you'll see a chart of WHO really makes the differnt brand
> names.
>
> http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
>
> Myth #2 Quality media never fails
>
> False! Having burned so many, I know better. ALL brands fail. If you
> restate it to say quality brands fail far less often, then that is
> correct. I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
> one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.
>
> Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad
>
> False. Sometimes you can. If you know what to look for. The process is
> just too much a bother and far from accurate and you need to do it
> BEFORE you burn the disc, and who bothers to do that? If you must,
> carfully pick up a blank DVD by the edges making sure not to get any
> fingerprints on the recording surface. Now under a powerful light,
> slowly and carefully tilt the disc back and forth. You do this a few
> hundred times your eyes get more apt to find very slight varations in
> the color of the coating. My experience, if a blank has one or more of
> these very minor and hard to see flaws somewhere on the disc and for
> some odd reason it always seems to be nearer the edge, it almost
> always will fail either during the burn process or when playing back
> the data. What happened is this is a production flaw. The coating ever
> so slightly got put on too thin and the encoding when you try to
> "burn" the disc likely won't take or will be inaccurate.
>
> Myth # 4 Burning speed matters
>
> This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
> your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
> into the encoding process. While you'll see some people suggesting you
> should never burn higher than 1X speed, that's foke lore. My rule of
> thumb is never burn higher than 50% of the rated speed of the media.
> So if your media says 16X and you burner can burn at 16X, set the burn
> speed to burn at 8X and you'll avoid most burning introduced errors.
>
> Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
> set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
> has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
> far ahead and the encoder may drop bits, often in the audio track
> which is more forgiving then the video tracks. If taken to extremes,
> this can result in a ruined burn where the disc simply won't play or
> gets rejected during the burn process or once you try to play the disc
> back it will skip, squeal and cause all kinds of grief since every DVD
> player has build in circuity that attempts to read the audio enough to
> where it can play it if some bits got dropped. The problem is the
> process is far from accurate. So to avoid it, help your burner out,
> run it at no faster than half speed when burning a disc.
>
> The actual encoding of the DVD, not any recompression phase if needed
> depending on software you use isn't that impacted by dropping the burn
> speed down. I typically "burn" a 4.7 GB disc taking 99% of the disc's
> surface in under 6 minues running at half the speed my LG burner can
> run the format at.
>
> Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista
>
> Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
> play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
> encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
> one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
> to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
> CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
> that comes with the necessary codecs.
>
> Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?
>
> From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
> Again, hardly worth the trouble. Better to use a DVD player, included
> with most DVD burning suites. See above. This way you get to see
> chapters and play the DVD off your computer like you would off a set
> top DVD player.
>
> You may be successful with this method. Place the DVD you want to play
> in your computer, wait till it spins up. If auto play is enabled on
> your system cancel it and go to Explorer, find your CD/DVD player, and
> click to open the DVD you have inserted.
>
> You should see a video folder with several files inside. Double click
> on any VOB file and see if it plays. If Vista finds a codec it should
> play the file with any associated application that understands .VOB.
>
> If you don't have any, many players do understand the format, but
> you'll also need need to download a MPEG-2 codec. One free player that
> easily plays DVD VOB files is called VLC Media Player. The downside is
> using this method you only can play one DVD file at a time, no menu
> features to click on, so a true DVD player is better.
>
> Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
> when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?
>
> If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
> underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
> to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
> computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
> a reduced frame size and see if that helps.
>
> For not playing at all or really playing poorly also check if you have
> MPEG-2 codec conflicts. One such tool is called Microsoft XP Video
> Decoder checkup Utility. It does work in Vista. A free download. Many
> other tools like Video Inspector and GSpot also free.
>
> Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.
>
> WAY common. DVDs can be very fickle. I've burned many a DVD that plays
> fine on the computer that created it, but refuses to play on any other
> computer. I've also had some DVDs play fine on some DVD set top player
> and act up or totally refuse to play on others.
>
> Two main culprits. The media's coating or burned at too high a
> bitrate.
>
> The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
> brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings on the
> bottom business end. The simple fact is some DVD players don't do that
> great a job and the laser trying to read the disc has trouble with the
> laser beam bouncing off the disc surface which may be either too shiny
> or not shiny enough. Newer players have better, often multiple lasers
> that work at different wave lengths that solve this problem.
>
> The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
> bitrate to maximum. Not only is this wasteful, meaning you'll be able
> to put less material on the DVD, it causes problems for some players
> trying to keep up with the higher bitrate stream. They show this by
> sputtering, skipping, audio getting out of sync an other annoying
> stuff.
>
> Solution, burn at a lower and ideally at a variable bit rate as
> opposed to a high constant bitrate.
>
> Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?
>
> Because they're made differently. Commerical DVDs you buy in the store
> go through a totally different process. The data is PRESSED into the
> media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
> misleading, is you "burn" the DVD. Actually, what really happens is
> like when writing to a hard drive the bits are simply wrote to the
> media. Obviously you can't expect some cheesy little DVD burner that
> now costs under a $100 often way under, to do as good a job as some
> commerical process where many DVDs are pressed in one operation on
> machines that cost millions.
>
> Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.
>
> Actually they can. Operative word again is CAN, not always will.
> This should be your last restort. The fact is the media surface of
> both CDs and DVDs can easily be damaged with little scratches, nicks,
> and oil from fingerprints, etc.. This will cause the disc
> to act up. How or if any repair attempt works depends on the extent of
> the damage and where on the disc it is. Gnerally, If you are making
> your own CDs and DVDs, arrage your media so the most important to you
> is first and it should get burned on the inner most tracks which are
> subject to the least external damage.
>
> Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
> discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes. When
> transferring my extensive music collection to Mp3 files I had one
> original and not replaceable disc that no matter what I couldn't read
> fully from. Windows would try and fail over and over. Looking close at
> the disc, it did have several pretty nasty scratches which probably
> were the issue. Putting this disc through a electric model of a DVD
> disc cleaner that does two passes, first repair, then polish, while it
> didn't totally remove the scratch, it did greatly reduce it and bingo,
> I then could transfer the files and make Mp3 files from it.
>
>

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 22:18:29 +0300, "kirk jim" <11@11.11> wrote:

>interesting read... I agree with you on most things since I have seen
>similar results...
>
>one time I backed up some data on the most expensive brand of dvd I could
>find thinking that it would be better.. terrified I found out that the media
>after some years was destroyed and there was no way I could recover and read
>the data.... other chepo dvds retained the information fine...
>
>Now for very important stuff I double backup things and leave copies on hard
>drives as well.. lol

Me too, I'm kind of paranoid about it. In fact for video stuff I make
a third back to DV tape my camera can read, just in case.

Good read and very true. Good work Adam! :-)

--
Dustin Harper
dharper@vistarip.com
http://www.vistarip.com

--
"Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
news:qokf139ta7nevcu7m60q5uq534p3f638mv@4ax.com...
> Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
> professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
> grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.
>
> Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)
>
> Not all media is created equal. In fact there are only a few companies
> that make "good" media, and no surprise, they are located mostly in
> the far East. Other "brands" cut corners, or are made by the handful
> of companies that have their own factories, under license, but often
> not with the same quality control or you may even be buying seconds
> that the "name" brands have rejected. I have no proof of that, but I
> do suspect it.
>
> Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
> media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
> page below you'll see a chart of WHO really makes the differnt brand
> names.
>
> http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
>
> Myth #2 Quality media never fails
>
> False! Having burned so many, I know better. ALL brands fail. If you
> restate it to say quality brands fail far less often, then that is
> correct. I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
> one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.
>
> Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad
>
> False. Sometimes you can. If you know what to look for. The process is
> just too much a bother and far from accurate and you need to do it
> BEFORE you burn the disc, and who bothers to do that? If you must,
> carfully pick up a blank DVD by the edges making sure not to get any
> fingerprints on the recording surface. Now under a powerful light,
> slowly and carefully tilt the disc back and forth. You do this a few
> hundred times your eyes get more apt to find very slight varations in
> the color of the coating. My experience, if a blank has one or more of
> these very minor and hard to see flaws somewhere on the disc and for
> some odd reason it always seems to be nearer the edge, it almost
> always will fail either during the burn process or when playing back
> the data. What happened is this is a production flaw. The coating ever
> so slightly got put on too thin and the encoding when you try to
> "burn" the disc likely won't take or will be inaccurate.
>
> Myth # 4 Burning speed matters
>
> This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
> your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
> into the encoding process. While you'll see some people suggesting you
> should never burn higher than 1X speed, that's foke lore. My rule of
> thumb is never burn higher than 50% of the rated speed of the media.
> So if your media says 16X and you burner can burn at 16X, set the burn
> speed to burn at 8X and you'll avoid most burning introduced errors.
>
> Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
> set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
> has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
> far ahead and the encoder may drop bits, often in the audio track
> which is more forgiving then the video tracks. If taken to extremes,
> this can result in a ruined burn where the disc simply won't play or
> gets rejected during the burn process or once you try to play the disc
> back it will skip, squeal and cause all kinds of grief since every DVD
> player has build in circuity that attempts to read the audio enough to
> where it can play it if some bits got dropped. The problem is the
> process is far from accurate. So to avoid it, help your burner out,
> run it at no faster than half speed when burning a disc.
>
> The actual encoding of the DVD, not any recompression phase if needed
> depending on software you use isn't that impacted by dropping the burn
> speed down. I typically "burn" a 4.7 GB disc taking 99% of the disc's
> surface in under 6 minues running at half the speed my LG burner can
> run the format at.
>
> Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista
>
> Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
> play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
> encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
> one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
> to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
> CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
> that comes with the necessary codecs.
>
> Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?
>
> From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
> Again, hardly worth the trouble. Better to use a DVD player, included
> with most DVD burning suites. See above. This way you get to see
> chapters and play the DVD off your computer like you would off a set
> top DVD player.
>
> You may be successful with this method. Place the DVD you want to play
> in your computer, wait till it spins up. If auto play is enabled on
> your system cancel it and go to Explorer, find your CD/DVD player, and
> click to open the DVD you have inserted.
>
> You should see a video folder with several files inside. Double click
> on any VOB file and see if it plays. If Vista finds a codec it should
> play the file with any associated application that understands .VOB.
>
> If you don't have any, many players do understand the format, but
> you'll also need need to download a MPEG-2 codec. One free player that
> easily plays DVD VOB files is called VLC Media Player. The downside is
> using this method you only can play one DVD file at a time, no menu
> features to click on, so a true DVD player is better.
>
> Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
> when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?
>
> If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
> underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
> to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
> computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
> a reduced frame size and see if that helps.
>
> For not playing at all or really playing poorly also check if you have
> MPEG-2 codec conflicts. One such tool is called Microsoft XP Video
> Decoder checkup Utility. It does work in Vista. A free download. Many
> other tools like Video Inspector and GSpot also free.
>
> Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.
>
> WAY common. DVDs can be very fickle. I've burned many a DVD that plays
> fine on the computer that created it, but refuses to play on any other
> computer. I've also had some DVDs play fine on some DVD set top player
> and act up or totally refuse to play on others.
>
> Two main culprits. The media's coating or burned at too high a
> bitrate.
>
> The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
> brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings on the
> bottom business end. The simple fact is some DVD players don't do that
> great a job and the laser trying to read the disc has trouble with the
> laser beam bouncing off the disc surface which may be either too shiny
> or not shiny enough. Newer players have better, often multiple lasers
> that work at different wave lengths that solve this problem.
>
> The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
> bitrate to maximum. Not only is this wasteful, meaning you'll be able
> to put less material on the DVD, it causes problems for some players
> trying to keep up with the higher bitrate stream. They show this by
> sputtering, skipping, audio getting out of sync an other annoying
> stuff.
>
> Solution, burn at a lower and ideally at a variable bit rate as
> opposed to a high constant bitrate.
>
> Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?
>
> Because they're made differently. Commerical DVDs you buy in the store
> go through a totally different process. The data is PRESSED into the
> media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
> misleading, is you "burn" the DVD. Actually, what really happens is
> like when writing to a hard drive the bits are simply wrote to the
> media. Obviously you can't expect some cheesy little DVD burner that
> now costs under a $100 often way under, to do as good a job as some
> commerical process where many DVDs are pressed in one operation on
> machines that cost millions.
>
> Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.
>
> Actually they can. Operative word again is CAN, not always will.
> This should be your last restort. The fact is the media surface of
> both CDs and DVDs can easily be damaged with little scratches, nicks,
> and oil from fingerprints, etc.. This will cause the disc
> to act up. How or if any repair attempt works depends on the extent of
> the damage and where on the disc it is. Gnerally, If you are making
> your own CDs and DVDs, arrage your media so the most important to you
> is first and it should get burned on the inner most tracks which are
> subject to the least external damage.
>
> Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
> discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes. When
> transferring my extensive music collection to Mp3 files I had one
> original and not replaceable disc that no matter what I couldn't read
> fully from. Windows would try and fail over and over. Looking close at
> the disc, it did have several pretty nasty scratches which probably
> were the issue. Putting this disc through a electric model of a DVD
> disc cleaner that does two passes, first repair, then polish, while it
> didn't totally remove the scratch, it did greatly reduce it and bingo,
> I then could transfer the files and make Mp3 files from it.
>
>

Ditto here.

Daze
-----

Dustin Harper wrote:
> Good read and very true. Good work Adam! :-)
>

Thanks, Adam. I haven't burned a lot of musical CDs, but I've always tried
to burn them on slow speeds, pretty much guessing at the reasons you put
forward here.
For anyone who ever messed with reel-to-reel, this is counter to the
practice there, where you wanted to record at the highest speed possible to
get the highest quality recording.
I don't think cassette recording decks gave you a choice of speeds, say if
you were copying an album. If so, it was only the very early cassette decks
that did that. All the ones I remember were pretty much one-speed, I guess
to make them compatible with car cassette players, Walkmans etc.
(I'm not talking about those small things mainly designed for recording
speech. I think they give you a choice of slow and fast speeds, mainly to
give you longer recording times.)


"Dustin Harper" <dharper@vistarip.com> wrote in message
news:A3F5B841-3C19-4632-A93E-25A16717931E@microsoft.com...
> Good read and very true. Good work Adam! :-)
>
> --
> Dustin Harper
> dharper@vistarip.com
> http://www.vistarip.com
>
> --
> "Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
> news:qokf139ta7nevcu7m60q5uq534p3f638mv@4ax.com...
>> Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
>> professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
>> grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.
>>
>> Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)
>>
>> Not all media is created equal. In fact there are only a few companies
>> that make "good" media, and no surprise, they are located mostly in
>> the far East. Other "brands" cut corners, or are made by the handful
>> of companies that have their own factories, under license, but often
>> not with the same quality control or you may even be buying seconds
>> that the "name" brands have rejected. I have no proof of that, but I
>> do suspect it.
>>
>> Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
>> media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
>> page below you'll see a chart of WHO really makes the differnt brand
>> names.
>>
>> http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
>>
>> Myth #2 Quality media never fails
>>
>> False! Having burned so many, I know better. ALL brands fail. If you
>> restate it to say quality brands fail far less often, then that is
>> correct. I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
>> one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.
>>
>> Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad
>>
>> False. Sometimes you can. If you know what to look for. The process is
>> just too much a bother and far from accurate and you need to do it
>> BEFORE you burn the disc, and who bothers to do that? If you must,
>> carfully pick up a blank DVD by the edges making sure not to get any
>> fingerprints on the recording surface. Now under a powerful light,
>> slowly and carefully tilt the disc back and forth. You do this a few
>> hundred times your eyes get more apt to find very slight varations in
>> the color of the coating. My experience, if a blank has one or more of
>> these very minor and hard to see flaws somewhere on the disc and for
>> some odd reason it always seems to be nearer the edge, it almost
>> always will fail either during the burn process or when playing back
>> the data. What happened is this is a production flaw. The coating ever
>> so slightly got put on too thin and the encoding when you try to
>> "burn" the disc likely won't take or will be inaccurate.
>>
>> Myth # 4 Burning speed matters
>>
>> This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
>> your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
>> into the encoding process. While you'll see some people suggesting you
>> should never burn higher than 1X speed, that's foke lore. My rule of
>> thumb is never burn higher than 50% of the rated speed of the media.
>> So if your media says 16X and you burner can burn at 16X, set the burn
>> speed to burn at 8X and you'll avoid most burning introduced errors.
>>
>> Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
>> set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
>> has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
>> far ahead and the encoder may drop bits, often in the audio track
>> which is more forgiving then the video tracks. If taken to extremes,
>> this can result in a ruined burn where the disc simply won't play or
>> gets rejected during the burn process or once you try to play the disc
>> back it will skip, squeal and cause all kinds of grief since every DVD
>> player has build in circuity that attempts to read the audio enough to
>> where it can play it if some bits got dropped. The problem is the
>> process is far from accurate. So to avoid it, help your burner out,
>> run it at no faster than half speed when burning a disc.
>>
>> The actual encoding of the DVD, not any recompression phase if needed
>> depending on software you use isn't that impacted by dropping the burn
>> speed down. I typically "burn" a 4.7 GB disc taking 99% of the disc's
>> surface in under 6 minues running at half the speed my LG burner can
>> run the format at.
>>
>> Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista
>>
>> Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
>> play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
>> encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
>> one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
>> to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
>> CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
>> that comes with the necessary codecs.
>>
>> Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?
>>
>> From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
>> Again, hardly worth the trouble. Better to use a DVD player, included
>> with most DVD burning suites. See above. This way you get to see
>> chapters and play the DVD off your computer like you would off a set
>> top DVD player.
>>
>> You may be successful with this method. Place the DVD you want to play
>> in your computer, wait till it spins up. If auto play is enabled on
>> your system cancel it and go to Explorer, find your CD/DVD player, and
>> click to open the DVD you have inserted.
>>
>> You should see a video folder with several files inside. Double click
>> on any VOB file and see if it plays. If Vista finds a codec it should
>> play the file with any associated application that understands .VOB.
>>
>> If you don't have any, many players do understand the format, but
>> you'll also need need to download a MPEG-2 codec. One free player that
>> easily plays DVD VOB files is called VLC Media Player. The downside is
>> using this method you only can play one DVD file at a time, no menu
>> features to click on, so a true DVD player is better.
>>
>> Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
>> when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?
>>
>> If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
>> underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
>> to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
>> computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
>> a reduced frame size and see if that helps.
>>
>> For not playing at all or really playing poorly also check if you have
>> MPEG-2 codec conflicts. One such tool is called Microsoft XP Video
>> Decoder checkup Utility. It does work in Vista. A free download. Many
>> other tools like Video Inspector and GSpot also free.
>>
>> Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.
>>
>> WAY common. DVDs can be very fickle. I've burned many a DVD that plays
>> fine on the computer that created it, but refuses to play on any other
>> computer. I've also had some DVDs play fine on some DVD set top player
>> and act up or totally refuse to play on others.
>>
>> Two main culprits. The media's coating or burned at too high a
>> bitrate.
>>
>> The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
>> brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings on the
>> bottom business end. The simple fact is some DVD players don't do that
>> great a job and the laser trying to read the disc has trouble with the
>> laser beam bouncing off the disc surface which may be either too shiny
>> or not shiny enough. Newer players have better, often multiple lasers
>> that work at different wave lengths that solve this problem.
>>
>> The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
>> bitrate to maximum. Not only is this wasteful, meaning you'll be able
>> to put less material on the DVD, it causes problems for some players
>> trying to keep up with the higher bitrate stream. They show this by
>> sputtering, skipping, audio getting out of sync an other annoying
>> stuff.
>>
>> Solution, burn at a lower and ideally at a variable bit rate as
>> opposed to a high constant bitrate.
>>
>> Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?
>>
>> Because they're made differently. Commerical DVDs you buy in the store
>> go through a totally different process. The data is PRESSED into the
>> media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
>> misleading, is you "burn" the DVD. Actually, what really happens is
>> like when writing to a hard drive the bits are simply wrote to the
>> media. Obviously you can't expect some cheesy little DVD burner that
>> now costs under a $100 often way under, to do as good a job as some
>> commerical process where many DVDs are pressed in one operation on
>> machines that cost millions.
>>
>> Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.
>>
>> Actually they can. Operative word again is CAN, not always will.
>> This should be your last restort. The fact is the media surface of
>> both CDs and DVDs can easily be damaged with little scratches, nicks,
>> and oil from fingerprints, etc.. This will cause the disc
>> to act up. How or if any repair attempt works depends on the extent of
>> the damage and where on the disc it is. Gnerally, If you are making
>> your own CDs and DVDs, arrage your media so the most important to you
>> is first and it should get burned on the inner most tracks which are
>> subject to the least external damage.
>>
>> Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
>> discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes. When
>> transferring my extensive music collection to Mp3 files I had one
>> original and not replaceable disc that no matter what I couldn't read
>> fully from. Windows would try and fail over and over. Looking close at
>> the disc, it did have several pretty nasty scratches which probably
>> were the issue. Putting this disc through a electric model of a DVD
>> disc cleaner that does two passes, first repair, then polish, while it
>> didn't totally remove the scratch, it did greatly reduce it and bingo,
>> I then could transfer the files and make Mp3 files from it.
>>
>>
>

Nice effort, Adam. Thanks.

Lang

"Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
news:qokf139ta7nevcu7m60q5uq534p3f638mv@4ax.com...
> Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
> professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
> grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.
>
> Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)
>
> Not all media is created equal. In fact there are only a few companies
> that make "good" media, and no surprise, they are located mostly in
> the far East. Other "brands" cut corners, or are made by the handful
> of companies that have their own factories, under license, but often
> not with the same quality control or you may even be buying seconds
> that the "name" brands have rejected. I have no proof of that, but I
> do suspect it.
>
> Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
> media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
> page below you'll see a chart of WHO really makes the differnt brand
> names.
>
> http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
>
> Myth #2 Quality media never fails
>
> False! Having burned so many, I know better. ALL brands fail. If you
> restate it to say quality brands fail far less often, then that is
> correct. I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
> one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.
>
> Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad
>
> False. Sometimes you can. If you know what to look for. The process is
> just too much a bother and far from accurate and you need to do it
> BEFORE you burn the disc, and who bothers to do that? If you must,
> carfully pick up a blank DVD by the edges making sure not to get any
> fingerprints on the recording surface. Now under a powerful light,
> slowly and carefully tilt the disc back and forth. You do this a few
> hundred times your eyes get more apt to find very slight varations in
> the color of the coating. My experience, if a blank has one or more of
> these very minor and hard to see flaws somewhere on the disc and for
> some odd reason it always seems to be nearer the edge, it almost
> always will fail either during the burn process or when playing back
> the data. What happened is this is a production flaw. The coating ever
> so slightly got put on too thin and the encoding when you try to
> "burn" the disc likely won't take or will be inaccurate.
>
> Myth # 4 Burning speed matters
>
> This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
> your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
> into the encoding process. While you'll see some people suggesting you
> should never burn higher than 1X speed, that's foke lore. My rule of
> thumb is never burn higher than 50% of the rated speed of the media.
> So if your media says 16X and you burner can burn at 16X, set the burn
> speed to burn at 8X and you'll avoid most burning introduced errors.
>
> Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
> set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
> has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
> far ahead and the encoder may drop bits, often in the audio track
> which is more forgiving then the video tracks. If taken to extremes,
> this can result in a ruined burn where the disc simply won't play or
> gets rejected during the burn process or once you try to play the disc
> back it will skip, squeal and cause all kinds of grief since every DVD
> player has build in circuity that attempts to read the audio enough to
> where it can play it if some bits got dropped. The problem is the
> process is far from accurate. So to avoid it, help your burner out,
> run it at no faster than half speed when burning a disc.
>
> The actual encoding of the DVD, not any recompression phase if needed
> depending on software you use isn't that impacted by dropping the burn
> speed down. I typically "burn" a 4.7 GB disc taking 99% of the disc's
> surface in under 6 minues running at half the speed my LG burner can
> run the format at.
>
> Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista
>
> Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
> play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
> encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
> one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
> to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
> CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
> that comes with the necessary codecs.
>
> Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?
>
> From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
> Again, hardly worth the trouble. Better to use a DVD player, included
> with most DVD burning suites. See above. This way you get to see
> chapters and play the DVD off your computer like you would off a set
> top DVD player.
>
> You may be successful with this method. Place the DVD you want to play
> in your computer, wait till it spins up. If auto play is enabled on
> your system cancel it and go to Explorer, find your CD/DVD player, and
> click to open the DVD you have inserted.
>
> You should see a video folder with several files inside. Double click
> on any VOB file and see if it plays. If Vista finds a codec it should
> play the file with any associated application that understands .VOB.
>
> If you don't have any, many players do understand the format, but
> you'll also need need to download a MPEG-2 codec. One free player that
> easily plays DVD VOB files is called VLC Media Player. The downside is
> using this method you only can play one DVD file at a time, no menu
> features to click on, so a true DVD player is better.
>
> Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
> when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?
>
> If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
> underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
> to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
> computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
> a reduced frame size and see if that helps.
>
> For not playing at all or really playing poorly also check if you have
> MPEG-2 codec conflicts. One such tool is called Microsoft XP Video
> Decoder checkup Utility. It does work in Vista. A free download. Many
> other tools like Video Inspector and GSpot also free.
>
> Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.
>
> WAY common. DVDs can be very fickle. I've burned many a DVD that plays
> fine on the computer that created it, but refuses to play on any other
> computer. I've also had some DVDs play fine on some DVD set top player
> and act up or totally refuse to play on others.
>
> Two main culprits. The media's coating or burned at too high a
> bitrate.
>
> The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
> brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings on the
> bottom business end. The simple fact is some DVD players don't do that
> great a job and the laser trying to read the disc has trouble with the
> laser beam bouncing off the disc surface which may be either too shiny
> or not shiny enough. Newer players have better, often multiple lasers
> that work at different wave lengths that solve this problem.
>
> The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
> bitrate to maximum. Not only is this wasteful, meaning you'll be able
> to put less material on the DVD, it causes problems for some players
> trying to keep up with the higher bitrate stream. They show this by
> sputtering, skipping, audio getting out of sync an other annoying
> stuff.
>
> Solution, burn at a lower and ideally at a variable bit rate as
> opposed to a high constant bitrate.
>
> Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?
>
> Because they're made differently. Commerical DVDs you buy in the store
> go through a totally different process. The data is PRESSED into the
> media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
> misleading, is you "burn" the DVD. Actually, what really happens is
> like when writing to a hard drive the bits are simply wrote to the
> media. Obviously you can't expect some cheesy little DVD burner that
> now costs under a $100 often way under, to do as good a job as some
> commerical process where many DVDs are pressed in one operation on
> machines that cost millions.
>
> Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.
>
> Actually they can. Operative word again is CAN, not always will.
> This should be your last restort. The fact is the media surface of
> both CDs and DVDs can easily be damaged with little scratches, nicks,
> and oil from fingerprints, etc.. This will cause the disc
> to act up. How or if any repair attempt works depends on the extent of
> the damage and where on the disc it is. Gnerally, If you are making
> your own CDs and DVDs, arrage your media so the most important to you
> is first and it should get burned on the inner most tracks which are
> subject to the least external damage.
>
> Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
> discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes. When
> transferring my extensive music collection to Mp3 files I had one
> original and not replaceable disc that no matter what I couldn't read
> fully from. Windows would try and fail over and over. Looking close at
> the disc, it did have several pretty nasty scratches which probably
> were the issue. Putting this disc through a electric model of a DVD
> disc cleaner that does two passes, first repair, then polish, while it
> didn't totally remove the scratch, it did greatly reduce it and bingo,
> I then could transfer the files and make Mp3 files from it.
>
>

Adam Albright <AA@ABC.net> wrote in
news:qokf139ta7nevcu7m60q5uq534p3f638mv@4ax.com:

> Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
> professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
> grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.
>
> Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)
>
> Not all media is created equal. In fact there are only a few companies
> that make "good" media, and no surprise, they are located mostly in
> the far East. Other "brands" cut corners, or are made by the handful
> of companies that have their own factories, under license, but often
> not with the same quality control or you may even be buying seconds
> that the "name" brands have rejected. I have no proof of that, but I
> do suspect it.
>
> Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
> media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
> page below you'll see a chart of WHO really makes the differnt brand
> names.
>
> http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
>
> Myth #2 Quality media never fails
>
> False! Having burned so many, I know better. ALL brands fail. If you
> restate it to say quality brands fail far less often, then that is
> correct. I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
> one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.
>
> Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad
>
> False. Sometimes you can. If you know what to look for. The process is
> just too much a bother and far from accurate and you need to do it
> BEFORE you burn the disc, and who bothers to do that? If you must,
> carfully pick up a blank DVD by the edges making sure not to get any
> fingerprints on the recording surface. Now under a powerful light,
> slowly and carefully tilt the disc back and forth. You do this a few
> hundred times your eyes get more apt to find very slight varations in
> the color of the coating. My experience, if a blank has one or more of
> these very minor and hard to see flaws somewhere on the disc and for
> some odd reason it always seems to be nearer the edge, it almost
> always will fail either during the burn process or when playing back
> the data. What happened is this is a production flaw. The coating ever
> so slightly got put on too thin and the encoding when you try to
> "burn" the disc likely won't take or will be inaccurate.
>
> Myth # 4 Burning speed matters
>
> This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
> your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
> into the encoding process. While you'll see some people suggesting you
> should never burn higher than 1X speed, that's foke lore. My rule of
> thumb is never burn higher than 50% of the rated speed of the media.
> So if your media says 16X and you burner can burn at 16X, set the burn
> speed to burn at 8X and you'll avoid most burning introduced errors.
>
> Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
> set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
> has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
> far ahead and the encoder may drop bits, often in the audio track
> which is more forgiving then the video tracks. If taken to extremes,
> this can result in a ruined burn where the disc simply won't play or
> gets rejected during the burn process or once you try to play the disc
> back it will skip, squeal and cause all kinds of grief since every DVD
> player has build in circuity that attempts to read the audio enough to
> where it can play it if some bits got dropped. The problem is the
> process is far from accurate. So to avoid it, help your burner out,
> run it at no faster than half speed when burning a disc.
>
> The actual encoding of the DVD, not any recompression phase if needed
> depending on software you use isn't that impacted by dropping the burn
> speed down. I typically "burn" a 4.7 GB disc taking 99% of the disc's
> surface in under 6 minues running at half the speed my LG burner can
> run the format at.
>
> Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista
>
> Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
> play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
> encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
> one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
> to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
> CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
> that comes with the necessary codecs.
>
> Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?
>
> From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
> Again, hardly worth the trouble. Better to use a DVD player, included
> with most DVD burning suites. See above. This way you get to see
> chapters and play the DVD off your computer like you would off a set
> top DVD player.
>
> You may be successful with this method. Place the DVD you want to play
> in your computer, wait till it spins up. If auto play is enabled on
> your system cancel it and go to Explorer, find your CD/DVD player, and
> click to open the DVD you have inserted.
>
> You should see a video folder with several files inside. Double click
> on any VOB file and see if it plays. If Vista finds a codec it should
> play the file with any associated application that understands .VOB.
>
> If you don't have any, many players do understand the format, but
> you'll also need need to download a MPEG-2 codec. One free player that
> easily plays DVD VOB files is called VLC Media Player. The downside is
> using this method you only can play one DVD file at a time, no menu
> features to click on, so a true DVD player is better.
>
> Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
> when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?
>
> If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
> underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
> to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
> computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
> a reduced frame size and see if that helps.
>
> For not playing at all or really playing poorly also check if you have
> MPEG-2 codec conflicts. One such tool is called Microsoft XP Video
> Decoder checkup Utility. It does work in Vista. A free download. Many
> other tools like Video Inspector and GSpot also free.
>
> Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.
>
> WAY common. DVDs can be very fickle. I've burned many a DVD that plays
> fine on the computer that created it, but refuses to play on any other
> computer. I've also had some DVDs play fine on some DVD set top player
> and act up or totally refuse to play on others.
>
> Two main culprits. The media's coating or burned at too high a
> bitrate.
>
> The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
> brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings on the
> bottom business end. The simple fact is some DVD players don't do that
> great a job and the laser trying to read the disc has trouble with the
> laser beam bouncing off the disc surface which may be either too shiny
> or not shiny enough. Newer players have better, often multiple lasers
> that work at different wave lengths that solve this problem.
>
> The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
> bitrate to maximum. Not only is this wasteful, meaning you'll be able
> to put less material on the DVD, it causes problems for some players
> trying to keep up with the higher bitrate stream. They show this by
> sputtering, skipping, audio getting out of sync an other annoying
> stuff.
>
> Solution, burn at a lower and ideally at a variable bit rate as
> opposed to a high constant bitrate.
>
> Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?
>
> Because they're made differently. Commerical DVDs you buy in the store
> go through a totally different process. The data is PRESSED into the
> media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
> misleading, is you "burn" the DVD. Actually, what really happens is
> like when writing to a hard drive the bits are simply wrote to the
> media. Obviously you can't expect some cheesy little DVD burner that
> now costs under a $100 often way under, to do as good a job as some
> commerical process where many DVDs are pressed in one operation on
> machines that cost millions.
>
> Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.
>
> Actually they can. Operative word again is CAN, not always will.
> This should be your last restort. The fact is the media surface of
> both CDs and DVDs can easily be damaged with little scratches, nicks,
> and oil from fingerprints, etc.. This will cause the disc
> to act up. How or if any repair attempt works depends on the extent of
> the damage and where on the disc it is. Gnerally, If you are making
> your own CDs and DVDs, arrage your media so the most important to you
> is first and it should get burned on the inner most tracks which are
> subject to the least external damage.
>
> Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
> discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes. When
> transferring my extensive music collection to Mp3 files I had one
> original and not replaceable disc that no matter what I couldn't read
> fully from. Windows would try and fail over and over. Looking close at
> the disc, it did have several pretty nasty scratches which probably
> were the issue. Putting this disc through a electric model of a DVD
> disc cleaner that does two passes, first repair, then polish, while it
> didn't totally remove the scratch, it did greatly reduce it and bingo,
> I then could transfer the files and make Mp3 files from it.
>
>

Good stuff Adam. Usefull link.

Thanks!

Nick Goetz

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 05:38:51 -0700, Nick Goetz <nbg@sympatico.ca>
>Adam Albright <AA@ABC.net> wrote in

>> Let me preface what I'm going to say by telling you I do this
>> professionally and have burned in excess of a 1,000 DVDs on various PC
>> grade computers and more CDs then I care to remember, tons of them.

Cool! I'm hoping you can shed a light on burning optical disks in
Vista, which in my experience has been pretty grim.

>> Myth #1 Quality of the media (the blank DVDs or CD's)

>> Not all media is created equal.

I've also found that what works on some drives may not work on others.

>> Nice site with lots of answers: Hint: the important thing, check the
>> media ID number. Lastly, if you scan to the very bottom of the linked
>> page below you'll see a chart of WHO makes the brand names.
>>
>> http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

Nice...

>> Myth #2 Quality media never fails
>>
>> I haven't bought a 100 blank DVD spindle yet where at least
>> one or two weren't bad, regardless of brand.

Hmm, OK. I don't have that many duds, but it takes a while to get
through spindles here, which are often 20s and 50s, so if I scale that
up to 100s, I'd prolly agree.

>> Myth #3 You can't tell by looking at a blank CD/DVD if it is bad

>> Sometimes you can.

More to the point, you can spot used disks that are likely to fail
(holes through the paint when held to the light) as well as drive
killers (crack from center, flaking paint as on a Sony I have here).

I've had a CDR literally explode within a 52-speed drive. Shaking the
drive sounded like a bag full of very small nails, and when we opened
it up, the largest fragment was smaller than a finger nail, with a LOT
of loose paint flakes. We scrapped the drive.

Hub cracks and gummed-on labels (especially if off-center) should be
considered contra-indications to using the disk, especially at full
speed. If you have to use them (e.g. to evacuate contents before
scrapping the disk), try to force 1x speed.

>> Myth # 4 Burning speed matters

>> This one is true. The faster you try to burn a DVD or CD, the harder
>> your burner has to work and the more likely tiny bloopers with sneek
>> into the encoding process.

>> Why? I'm not talking data discs. I'm talking media that is playable on
>> set up DVD players, ie any multimedia disc. Since most of this class
>> has a audio track, even with a larger buffer, the burner can get too
>> far ahead and the encoder may drop bits

What about laser strength and burn time?

>> Myth # 5 My DVDs don't play in Vista
>>
>> Sure they can. Operative word here is CAN play, not automatically will
>> play. The reason is to play a DVD off your computer you need a MPEG-2
>> encoder/decoder commonly called a codec. Microsoft doesn't include
>> one, at least not in the business version I have. So you either need
>> to install one from the web, (generally bad idea) or buy a suite of
>> CD/DVD burning software like Roxio or Nero or CyberLink or something
>> that comes with the necessary codecs.

It's strange that even now, Windows lacks native DVD support,
requiring bundleware such as PowerDVD or Nero Showtime.

The trouble is, often this bundleware won't install on Vista (e.g. OEM
Nero Express 6). If that's the case, you're screwed.

>> Myth # 6 Why don't Media Player play my DVDs?
>>
>> From what I understand, wasn't designed to, but it can be forced to.
>>
>> Myth # 7 Why do my DVDs start to play, but sputter, slow down, quit
>> when trying to play back on my computer or not play at all?
>>
>> If bad playback, this is fairly common when playing DVDs back on a
>> underpowered or poorly configured computer. Most people of course try
>> to play the DVD back at full screen which puts further stress on the
>> computer and it simply may not be able to keep up. Try playing back in
>> a reduced frame size and see if that helps.

It seems strange that we are still having that problem today...

>> Myth # 8 My DVD's play fine for me, won't play for others.
>>
>> WAY common. The media's coating or burned at too high a bitrate.
>>
>> The first issue is due to reflectivity. If you have more than one
>> brand of blank DVD handy, compare the color of the coatings
>>
>> The big mistake people "burning" DVDs often make is cranking up the
>> bitrate to maximum. ...causes problems for players trying to keep up

>> Myth # 9, why do commerical DVD play and the ones I burn don't?
>>
>> Because they're made differently. The data is PRESSED into the
>> media. If you make a home brew DVD the laymen term and very
>> misleading, is you "burn" the DVD.

As I understand it, R and RW disks involve burning paint via a more
intense laser, whereas ROMs are pressed aluminium. How well the R and
RWs work depends on how well they can pretend to be pressed aluminium
for devices designed to ASSume pressed aluminium media.

>> Myth #10 Those CD/DVD cleaner gizmos don't work at all.

>> Now about those little devices that claim to clean/repair damaged
>> discs. I can say I haved used them and they DO work, sometimes.

Three things:

1) Disks used to clean drives

These may look like a CD with a brush on it, to clean the laser lens.
But what is mechanically safe at 1x speed (audio CD players) may be
destructive at higher computer drive speeds, so Avoid.

2) Underside scratches

These should be amenable to repair, tho I've not found tools to do so.

3) Topside scratches

The important side of the disk is the side that has the paint on it,
as it is the paint that holds the data! This is usually, but not
always, the top side. If that's scratched, there's no way to fix.

ROM aluminium is tougher, but can still get damaged.



>--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
Saws are too hard to use.
Be easier to use!
>--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -

cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user) wrote:
....
> It's strange that even now, Windows lacks native DVD support,
> requiring bundleware such as PowerDVD or Nero Showtime...

Well, I have no facts to offer, but my nose detects the faint
yet unmistakable spoor of lawyers on the path to the answer ;o)