Worst - KProbe - Ever.

[Fandim]

Well, I've posted a lot of scans through the days, and thought some people might find this one pretty amusing.

This is the worst scan I've ever gotten from an UN-DAMAGED disc burned on my NEC3500.

Here goes it.



Seth

[Edmund Blackadder]

That was amuzing.

But here's my circus of the day:

A scan of Princo DVD-R, burned about 2 1/2 years ago. Ever since I got KProbe compatible burner, the scans from these discs were like that, so I wouldn't say that they are degrading or going bad over time. It's just that they scan like this.

This Princo plays perfectly start to end on all my DVD players and I have absolutely no trouble copying from it using any of my computer DVD drives. I've had more trouble playing discs that had only half of PI values of this disc, but this one just keeps going. It's a mystery. Maybe it's doing OK because of the relatively low PIF values .

EDIT: Sorry, the disc burned with Pioneer DVR-A03 (not Sony DRX-500ULX, which I didn't have back then yet). Still, never such a burn with DVR-A03 on other discs.

[lordsmurf]

Your "circus" is why scanning is only a portion of the battle. These "PI/PO warriors" online tend to miss the bigger picture, which includes accessing the data/video, as well as surface scans and read tests. (Don't take that the wrong way Fandim, I like to see your scan work.)

[chas0039]

I just read at another forum how one poster has never had any "bad" burns on his NEC 3500 with the same Optodiscs as above. I'll bet he never has them scanned.

Thanks for the post, I'll be avoiding them in the future as before.

I know others disagree, but I will take a good scan that plays over a bad scan that plays any day.

[Zisguy1]

Sure, a good scan is nice. But if it plays perfectly either way, who cares? I sure wouldn't waste a disc reburning, but I probably would avoid that brand in the future.

[chas0039]

Sure, a good scan is nice. But if it plays perfectly either way, who cares? I sure wouldn't waste a disc reburning, but I probably would avoid that brand in the future.

Exactly my point. Other's scans save me the trouble of buying marginal media to began with. You know full well you will not go out and buy either of the media scanned above.

[steve2713]

Fandim, have you done a transfer rate test? How's the disc play? Sometimes your scans are incredibly strange to say the least. I've seen where liteon drives give wildly inaccurate PI/PO tests with certain firmwares and certain media, is it possible that that is what is occurring here? One advantage with Benq drives, their PI/PO tests do not vary whatsoever between firmwares, they're actually awesome drives for doing PI/PO tests.

Edmund - Your PIF levels aren't that terrible, that's why they play fine. It's not uncommon to have PI that high and have no playback issues, so long as the PIF is reasonable.

[blinky88]

The only test I make is actually playing the backup. If it plays thought without pauses, split frames etc. I consider the blank is good. I find it difficult to understand why anyone would take 'what must be' many hours work testing, when all that is really required 'is to establish' if the backup has any problems in the playback.

[Gen-An]

Why do people run benchmarks on their video cards, or anything else for that matter? It's a hobby.

[dipstick]

A scan takes about 10 min or less. Watching the movie could take 2 hours or more. And just because it playes fine on your player, doesn't mean it's a well burned disk.

[chas0039]

The web is full of stories from people who had discs that "played fine" and then lost everything. Scans just give an extra measure of security and they will tell if something has gone wrong.

[steve2713]

Transfer rate tests are nice, in particular, because they only take about 2 minutes and are an excellent indicator of whether or not the disc is likely to play smoothly.

[Fandim]

Transfer rate tests, if done for accuracy, take roughly 4-6 minutes on a 16x drive.

And by the way, Smurf, I dont really pay much attention to the scans overall, it's just nice to see how they turn out... The main thing that's important to me, is that they can be read back using DVD Decrypter, and/or other ripping software after the burn...that way even if the playback is flawed - at least I have retained 100% of the data, and can burn again.. On important discs (irreplaceable data), I always burn 2 extra copies on different media ID's, and run them both through DVD Decrypter, and make sure there's no slowdowns ripping the data, just for safe measure. Then, into the fireproof safe they go. (although, I often times question the integrity of a disc in a safe during a fire...as I'm sure the insides would heat up considerably).



(Take a look at the errors, heh heh - this isnt liteon specific. )

[steve2713]

If the PIF errors actually were as high as your Liteon was reporting, you'd never be able to even complete a transfer rate test and you'd never be able to extract the data, so the results are definitely inaccurate. A drive accurately reporting PIF levels of around 200 would FAR exceed the levels for a disc that could be extracted. Levels above 50 PIF are severely pushing the limits of a disc that can be extracted, let alone 200. So your Liteon is not accurately reporting the PIF errors.

The transfer rate test would indicate you'd likely have some skipping issues in the last GB of the disc.

Transfer rate tests with Nero CD-DVD Speed take less than 3 minutes (at least on some drives), and that's on a slower drive than yours. Differing programs, differing speeds apparently - they clearly do their tests differently than one another.

[Fandim]

Steve - the test I ran has over 13,000 read errors.

And to do an *accurate* rate transfer test (many programs have settings for this, for speed or accuracy), the disc must be read back 100%. Thus, it could not be completed any faster than you could rip the disc.

I'm not vouching for the accuracy of the K-Probe, either. I just post the results I get. <shrug> I in no way endorse them. Heh. You've stated several times on some of my scans how awful my liteon is, and said how suspicious the scans look - and act as if I'm in some way preaching that these scans should be taken as the spoken word of god.

Scans are just that - scans. The liteon obviously has the main fact of the matter right - this is a horrendous burn - 100% grade F coaster.

And about your assumption about PIF errors, etc.. if they're over 50 - that does NOT always mean a readback error. If you check closely, you'll see my Liteon only has a handful of readback errors all total when performing a KProbe on this disc.

Take it for what it's worth - if nothing else - you get to see how this particular media type scans on an 832. Heh heh.

Seth

[steve2713]

Sorry, I'm not intending to offend. You are correct when you point out that for the most accurate transfer rate test you need to do it at rip speed. Nero CD-DVD Speed has adjustable settings from speed to accuracy and several in between, I usually do my tests set in between the two and they take under 3 minutes.

I never said that over 50 PIF errors will automatically lead to a playback error, as I said at that level it's severely pushing the limits of an extractable disc, please don't put words into my mouth.

I'll say it again. If it genuinely had consistent PIF errors around 200 as your test shows, it'd have an insane amount of read errors and a transfer rate test wouldn't get more than a few hundred MBs into the disc before it failed and stopped because of a read error, let alone complete as it did on your NEC. Now, we know that NEC burners are AVERAGE readers, not great, not terrible. So what does this say for the Liteon's struggles in reading the disc? I don't have any doubts that it'd be hopeless trying a transfer rate test with the Liteon, but a transfer rate on 10 random drives would likely show complete transfer tests, which is to say, zero read errors.

I'm not looking to bash your drive, that's not my point at all, my whole point for commenting on a scan like this is to point out that it's extremely misleading. A disc scanned with those amounts of PIF errors should be hopelessly unreadable, but the NEC scan shows that's not the case at all. Let me put it this way - scanned for PI/PO errors on ten other random drives, that same disc would probably not have higher than 40 or 50 max PIF errors on any other drive. The numbers reported by your Liteon may well be entirely accurate for your drive, but it's an INACCURATE representation of the disc, common knowledge says that PIF errors hovering around 200 would create a hopelessly unreadable disc, and yet an average reader had relatively few struggles with reading it, only in the last 800MB or so did it begin to really slow down.

My reason for making comments on an unusual test like this one is to point out that this particular PI/PO scan is very misleading, as the NEC test has shown. I'm not looking for arguments, I'm not trying to belittle your burner or your tests, just giving a 'precaution' to anyone looking at the Kprobe to take it with a LARGE grain of salt.

[Fandim]

lol, I'm not worried about my burner being belittled...I have no pride in a piece of equipment...it's just that. I dont use the liteon for burning etc, just scanning.. heh heh. And Steve, again, I point out... The Liteon reads this disc with only 3 errors.. Unlike the NEC's 13 thousand. Let me see if I can find the disc, and I'll scan it again, this time using dvdinfo with the liteon.

Steve, you have to remember - the transfer test using DVDInfo Pro dosnt stop as soon as it encounters an error, like CD Speed. Look at the scan again, and you'll see that literally - the NEC had 13,000 errors trying to read back this disc.
Seth

[Fandim]

Steve - these scans were ran back to back to back.

Here is the KProbe, first.




Next - the DVD Info Transfer test on the NEC. (NOTICE: It has 197k errors)



Finally - the DVD Info Transfer test on my Liteon. It's able to fully read back all data. Yes, the drive that 'struggles' (as you put it) with the KProbe.



Scans are a funky busines these days, eh?

Another one for the pile.


Seth

[steve2713]

The fact that the Liteon had a decent transfer rate test and had no read errors only further backs up my point - the Liteon's reported PIF errors is a misleading indication of the quality of the disc - a disc that has been accurately reported with those levels of PIF errors would have unreadable portions of disc. BTW, I've certainly had discs that had COMPLETELY inaccurate PI/PO scans with both my Liteon and my Benq. It doesn't happen very often, they're usually on the money with their tests, with transfer rate tests corresponding to the level of PI/PO errors, but it does happen. That's the whole reason for pointing out your PI/PO scan.

Here's a Princo disc scanned on my Benq, a HORRIBLE disc if you're to judge by the scan, a hopelessly bad coaster:




Here's the same disc scanned on my Liteon, a COMPLETELY different result, and a pretty decent burn, in complete contrast to what the Benq would indicate:



and here's a transfer rate test of the disc on the liteon:



and transfer rate on the Benq, the disc has an almost perfect transfer rate test and no errors, which is simply IMPOSSIBLE if the Benq's PI/PO test errors were accurate:




So, what's this say? My Benq's PI/PO test is completely inaccurate. It reported over 280k PO errors (!!) and yet the disc is read back almost perfectly, with zero read errors. I haven't found any playback issues with the disc at this point, either. One of the tests is giving an inaccurate representation of the disc, and it's obvious it's the Benq's PI/PO test in this case. The PI/PO test is misleading, as is your PI/PO test, that's the simple point I'm trying to make.

[Fandim]

Hmmm...I'm not calling you a liar, so dont take this the wrong way? But why are the lengths of the DVD's different in your scans...? (in the rate test...one is 4.37, one is 4.38...in the CD speed, one ends at 4478, the other ends at 4475...?) Ironically, the shorter disc in both cases - one scan done on the liteon, then the shorter with the opposite BenQ scan, seems to be where the problems is...while the longer disc, seems fine in both scans?

Also, your scan with your BenQ, appears to have been done with the accuracy turned down, to favor speed, which does not catch errors nearly as much in DVD Speed. However, with the Liteon's transfer test, it appears to be set for max accuracy, as the scan took 3x as long, despite the read rate not being that much slower.

[steve2713]

The Benq's PI/PO test stops at 4475 from the number of errors near the edge of the disc - I've had tests stop far short of the edge of the disc if the number of errors reported gets too high. I can post several other scans of discs that have stopped before they've reached the edge of the disc if you'd like.

The Benq's transfer rate is listed at 4.38, a full disc, as Nero CD-DVD Speed sometimes lists a disc at full capacity if I start the test too soon after inserting it into the drive, it must have to do with the way it recognizes the disc. Sometimes it will report a disc as being 4488mb in the PI/PO test when it's not actually that large, I just have to eject and reinsert the disc again and wait longer before I start the test to have it show the correct disc capacity. After I saw your post, I just now reinserted the disc into the Benq and it correctly reported the disc as 4.37 rather than 4.38, I'll run another scan if you'd like.

I'll do another transfer rate test on the Benq at full accuracy for you, I usually just do it at an 'in between' setting as it's much quicker and will still read any significant slowdowns in the test. I'll post it in a few minutes.

[xxiangg]

If you use LiteOn + Kprobe, the scan speed can greatly affect
the results. My LiteOn 812@832 will report PI's more than 10
times greater if scanned at 4X compared with scanned at 1X. Try
a scan at 1X to see what you get. By the way, most DVD players
read the disk at 1X. If you 1X scan is OK, the disk should be
played fine on DVD players. On the other hand, if a disk playing
on DVD players fine does not mean that it will have a pretty
scan on 4X.

[steve2713]

Here's another Benq transfer rate test, this time I waited for the disc to be recognized before I started up Nero CD-DVD Speed so it would show 4.37, the correct size.



As you can see, this is actually probably the best of the 3 transfer rates, they all have a slight slowdown at some point near the edge, but it's not enough of a slowdown to usually lead to playback issues in my experience.

Here's a scandisc on the Benq, zero questionable portions of the disc. Also. here's a transfer rate test with DVDInfoPro if you're curious. I didn't post them before as they didn't seem to add much, the DVDInfoPro scan is basically identical to the Nero CD-DVD Speed transfer test, so I didn't bother posting it, and the scandisc seemed unnecessary, considering the lack of problems in the transfer rate tests.







Here's a transfer rate test of the disc on my NEC 2500:






Here's a different disc that has stopped short of finishing it's PI/PO test because of a high number of errors/high jitter, a more severe example of what happened with the disc in question that stopped at 4475mb on the Benq - this is a Sonic MUST001 disc burned at 8x :P , the burn size was 4478, clearly these are best left at 4x...

[Fandim]

as for your transfer rate tests (the one on the NEC2500) - again, you used a quicker scanning method, which can easily skip right passed errored segments of a disc, and make a huge problem-area not even show up...while using your other scan, you did a full in depth one.

i.e. DVDInfo always does a deep scan - your CD Speed is set to not full accuracy, so didnt do a full readback.

[proxyx99]

Your "circus" is why scanning is only a portion of the battle. These "PI/PO warriors" online tend to miss the bigger picture, which includes accessing the data/video, as well as surface scans and read tests. (Don't take that the wrong way Fandim, I like to see your scan work.)

LS, maybe I missed something but PI/PO tests include all of the above mentioned, it is reading all the data, file by file and bit by bit. As to video access, this has nothing to do with any scans, they pertain to burn quality only. Video access is dependent on the video files integrity which none of the burning apps is verifying (they don't care what's beeing burned).
You cannot get good scan and bad surface scan at the same time to my understanding, or can you...?

[proxyx99]

If the PIF errors actually were as high as your Liteon was reporting, you'd never be able to even complete a transfer rate test and you'd never be able to extract the data, so the results are definitely inaccurate. A drive accurately reporting PIF levels of around 200 would FAR exceed the levels for a disc that could be extracted. Levels above 50 PIF are severely pushing the limits of a disc that can be extracted, let alone 200. So your Liteon is not accurately reporting the PIF errors.

That is totally incorrect. Discs that have high PI (200-500 range) like my early Princo's are still perfectly playable due to player's error correction. These scans are not coming from the blue sky and values are generated by the burner/player circuits not the K-probe which is only puting them in graphical form. Many Mitsumi's I've seen have high PI and play OK (may not be suitable for fast data extraction though). This is perfectly visible in DVDDecrypter - slows down but still reads. Bad blocks will interrupt the process as well as sudden spikes in PI/PO but much higher then you seem to indicate as border values.

[steve2713]

If the PIF errors actually were as high as your Liteon was reporting, you'd never be able to even complete a transfer rate test and you'd never be able to extract the data, so the results are definitely inaccurate. A drive accurately reporting PIF levels of around 200 would FAR exceed the levels for a disc that could be extracted. Levels above 50 PIF are severely pushing the limits of a disc that can be extracted, let alone 200. So your Liteon is not accurately reporting the PIF errors.

That is totally incorrect. Discs that have high PI (200-500 range) like my early Princo's are still perfectly playable due to player's error correction. These scans are not coming from the blue sky and values are generated by the burner/player circuits not the K-probe which is only puting them in graphical form. Many Mitsumi's I've seen have high PI and play OK (may not be suitable for fast data extraction though). This is perfectly visible in DVDDecrypter - slows down but still reads. Bad blocks will interrupt the process as well as sudden spikes in PI/PO but much higher then you seem to indicate as border values.

No, you've misunderstood what I said. I said discs with high PIF of 200+ would be a problem, not PI levels of 200+ There's a huge difference, and perhaps you don't even know the difference between PI and PIF errors (apparently you don't, so please don't say I'm totally incorrect when you don't even know PI from PIF errors ).

Edmund - Your PIF levels aren't that terrible, that's why they play fine. It's not uncommon to have PI that high and have no playback issues, so long as the PIF is reasonable.

Hmm, a quote of mine from earlier in THIS very thread, where I respond to Edmund's disc with PI levels of 900, I told him they often will play fine with PI levels even that high, because his PIF levels are OK.

So please learn to decipher between PI and PIF errors, they're two very different issues, extended levels of 200+ PIF indicates a hopelessly bad coaster with unreadable sections of disc, IF the error levels are being correctly reported.

[steve2713]

as for your transfer rate tests (the one on the NEC2500) - again, you used a quicker scanning method, which can easily skip right passed errored segments of a disc, and make a huge problem-area not even show up...while using your other scan, you did a full in depth one.

i.e. DVDInfo always does a deep scan - your CD Speed is set to not full accuracy, so didnt do a full readback.

NEC 2500 test done at full accuracy, for you:



There's a reason why I usually use an in-between setting - It takes far less time and still will nearly always reveal any major slowdowns in the disc. The quicker test obviously doesn't sample the entire disc, but 'slowdown' portions of the disc are almost always in large enough portions that even the FASTEST test will show some kind of dip in a problem area, and that's all I need to know for my own tests. If you want to nitpick, I suppose I should post transfer rate tests at full accuracy for entirely accurate comparisons.

[proxyx99]

No, you've misunderstood what I said. I said discs with high PIF of 200+ would be a problem, not PI levels of 200+ There's a huge difference, and perhaps you don't even know the difference between PI and PIF errors (apparently you don't, so please don't say I'm totally incorrect when you don't even know PI from PIF errors ).

My omission, sorry. It somehow got stuck in my mind that you were talking solely PI. Very high PIF's often do fall outside reader's error correction ability indeed.
Basically PIF is an unrecoverable PI error so both go hand in hand. Too many of PI erors usually result in failure which is PIF. In that sense I was not entirely wrong pointing out that high error ratio often means nothing if the reader is still able to correct them... don't you think? In my view PI curve gives you the idea how prone is the media to errors whereas PIF shows how often the error boundry has been crossed (=data compromised) what is truly a red flag for the media/burner combo.