Is my Pioneer A04 dying?

[Dethoff]

I have owned the retail Pioneer A04 for over a year and have enjoyed great success burning close to one hundred DVD-Rs on a variety of media. They have always played back flawlessly on all three of my set top DVD players.

Just recenty, many of the burned disks are giving me trouble on playback, where they either skip or stop. The problem seems more problematic as one gets further into the movie.

I am wondering whether I have just run into a bad batch of disks, or could it be that my burner is dying. I had been using a variety of disks, most recently Memorex 4X from Best Buy.

I have firmware 1.33. Would there be any reason to try the 1.40 version. I do not care whether I can burn cheap media at 2x speed, I only want dependable burns.

Any ideas?

[noki]

more info needed. do the dvdrs you burnt a year ago exhibit the same problem? do the newly created dvdrs play back okay on your PC?

[lordsmurf]

CMC discs are known to be garbage.. Memorex uses CMC most often ... what is the media ID of the disc, and the write strategy ?

[jeex]

lordsmurf is totally right. memorex dvd-r's suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

[Dethoff]

Thanks for the input,

I think the problem relates to the most recent Memorex discs which I purchased. Although I have been using Memorex disc form Best Buy for some time with success, I did not realize that they are not all the same. I went back and reviewed what did and didn't work. Here is my experience:

older Memorex 2x discs were CMC Mag CO...worked fine
newer Memorex 4X disks were CMCMag AF1...worked fine
Newest Memorex 4x disks are Prodisc S03....these are the ones that are giving me problems



So, I now have about 10 of these Prodisc S03s. Do I just chuck them, or is upgrading my firmware likely to give me broader conpatibility?

Why does this whole thing have to be such a crap shoot?


BTW, I don't know what you mean by write strategy.

Thanks again