What Kind of DVD-Rs are These?

[rkr1958]

I've previously bought two batches of 50 (each) Accu DVD-Rs from mertline.com (http://www.meritline.com/ac47dvsilbla1.html). I've been extermly happy with these. They've played without problem in my Toshiba SD2800 settop player. I recently ran out and wanted to reorder but found out that merline is out. So I went to ebay and bought 50 "Accu" DVD-Rs from there. This batch is terrible. I get a lot of blockness when I try to play them in my settop DVD player. Also, my Sony DRU-500a can't even read the discs back after burning them! What's up with that!? So I thought I'd check them out with ADVDInfo. I get the following when I try to read the, "0E - Pre-Recoreded Information Lead-In" information:
"Aspi Command Returned; Sense Key 05h; ASC 24h; ASCQ 00h".

Here's what I got for the 1st batch of 50 (from meritline.com):
00 6A 00 00 01 40 C1 FD 9E D8 50 00 02 87 0D 13 .J...@....P.....
88 99 80 00 03 4C 65 61 64 20 44 00 04 61 74 61 .....LEAD D..ATA
20 20 20 00 05 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 .............

Here's what I got for the 2nd batch of 50 (from meritline.com):
00 6A 00 00 01 40 C1 FD 9E D8 50 00 02 89 0E 13 .J...@....P.....
87 88 80 00 03 53 4F 4E 59 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 .....SONY.......
00 00 00 00 05 88 80 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 ................

What in the heck are the discs I got off of ebay? Lesson learned (for me anyway) is don't buy unbranded bulk DVDs from ebay. I'll stick with meritline.com in the future for Accu DVD-Rs. Also, can anyone recommend any reasonably priced alternative to Accu DVD-Rs that work well with the Sony DRU-500a?

[txpharoah]

Most of my Leaddata discs turned out terrible. Horrible media. The "Sony" discs you have are probably a fake code on some crappy media. I forget which one. It's been posted before.

[rkr1958]

The "Sony" discs you have are probably a fake code on some crappy media. I forget which one. It's been posted before.

The "Sony" discs, which were in the second batch I got from meritline.com seem just fine. The problem I'm having are with the "Accu" discs I bought off of ebay. I can't even read the "0E" code on these. Are these discs fake? I just didn't realize what find of variability there across the Accu.

[rkr1958]

I just flashed my DRU-500a firmware to 2.0f (from 1.0f). This made all the difference with these discs. These discs are now readable in my DRU-500a drive and seem to play well in my Toshiba SD2800 (I've only tested one disc though after flashing). Also, this flash seems to correct a "cyclic redundancy error" (read error) I got about 60% to 70% of the time with these discs (and the ACCUs discs) when I tried to read them in my NEC DV-5700A DVD-ROM drive (see https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=159694&highlight= ).
The only downside is that these discs now burn at 1x instead of 2x.