inconsistant burning results when copying dvds

[tourist]

hello,
I showed a friend of mine how to copy dvd's using dvddecrypter, and dvdshrink3.0.
I have copied many movies at my house using this method, and I don't think i've had a problem yet. my friend also has a far superior system to mine
I have a pIII 500MHz with 392 mb sdram. He has a pIV 2.4 G, and 700 or so megs of ram. he is running xp home edition

anyway, the decrypting and shrinking process seem to go fine.
When he has burned the movies back to dvd-r or dvd+r, (and I mean he can burn the same movie twice to 2 of the same discs, and one of them might play fine, but the other one will be choppy. the video looks great as far as being a clear picture, but it just seems to stop and start. ( kind of like someone is sitting there with the dvd player remote hitting pause and play every so often.

so we get to examining the discs, and we notice that all of the ones that do this choppy thing have some wierd markings on the burned side. you know how you can see how much of the disc has been burned to. instead of it being a solid amount of data written to the discs, there are small breaks in the written portion or something.
it seems that his pc locks up sometimes during the burning of a dvd. what'
s wierd is that it usually comes up with the burn process completed successfuly, but when you go to click ok and get the disc out, it's totally locked up. no mouse moving, no hitting ctrl,alt,del, nothing. you just have to turn pc off and turn it back on. it seems that the movies that are choppy are the ones that the pc locks up on while burning. anyone had this or a similiar problem that might know what it is?

thanks, and sorry for the long post.

[tito13kfm]

I've never experienced this personally but things I can recommend are. Try switching media brands, try switching burning programs, unplug the network connection to his cable/dsl modem, make sure the drive is in dma mode and not pio, stop all background programs that may be running, turn off any virus-protection or firewall software, don't use nero.

those are just some things to get you started. I'm leaning towards either bad media or faulty burning engine in the burning program.

[tourist]

hey,

thanks for the suggestions. I am thinking it's bad media as well, considering that i got 100 4x dvd-r for $65.

I was just hoping it wasn't because they were such a good deal.

but I will try some of the other things also.

thanks