I have recently burned several DVDs made up from old VHS and Beta transfers, TV show captures, etc - stuff I want to be sure 'works' as I want to discard the original media and AVI's.

To my dismay, some of the DVDs I burned played 'badly' (jerky) or not at all ('disk error') on my Akai DVPS 760 DVD Player. The same DVDs played great on my Apex and other DVD players. Since my Akai has been generally reliable, this caused me to spend days (and $$$!) on coasters until I got to the bottom of the issue. For the benefit of others, I figured I should post my findings here.

The bottom line is, my Sony DRU-510A burner is not burning 'good' DVDs. I took a non-working (on the akai) TDK DVD+R disk to work, where I have a crappy Teac +R only DVD burner (bundled with my dell workstation) and burned a direct copy to an identical TDK DVD+R disk. I ran a binary compare of the two disks (using 'beyond compare'); the two disks compared 100%. The disk burned on the office TEAC played just fine in my akai.

I also took the same files (used as a 'source' for the Sony burn) into the office on a removable USB drive, and burned a new DVD on the office TEAC, and the disk was fine.

I've used two authoring programs (TMPG DVD Author and DVD Maestro), two burning programs (Sonic 'Record Now' and TMPG's built in prog), and several media (TDK, Memorex, and no-name). In all cases, DVD+Rs burned on the Sony won't play at all on the Akai but will play on my Apex. DVD-Rs burned on the Sony play very badly on the Akai but fine on the Apex. DVD+RWs burned on the Sony play JUST FINE on the Akai ... go figure! DVD+Rs burned on the office TEAC play fine on the Akai. Sadly, my office TEAC is a +R only burner, so I can't burn to DVD-R on that burner.

I downloaded the latest firmware for the Sony and applied it; I downloaded a 'test' program from Sony's site and the drive 'passed'. I downloaded a utility from Sony's site that let's you 'force' the write speed to be slower if you wish, so I could burn the 4x media at 2.4x. I downloaded the latest versions of 'Record Now' and used it instead. NOTHING will make the Sony burner burn DVD+Rs that play on my Akai. This suggests the Akai is defective (since the same disks play on my Apex) .... but ... the same DATA burned to the same MEDIA on my office burner plays fine on the Akai ... so this sadly points to the Sony being the culprit.

Oh well .... the good news is, I guess, that all I have to do is copy the filies from the 'bad' DVD and burn them on another burner to get a DVD that will play on my Akai.

And why do I care ... why not just use the Apex rather than the Akai to play the DVDs ...? Well, my point is not just to play the DVDs now; my goal is to produce DVDs that I can reliably play in 10 years on 'any' player. Like I said, since the DVDs are ok from a 'data' perspective, I don't have to worry that much ... but it took me a long time to arrive at that conclusion!