How to test whether your DVD is a bad burn

[lordsmurf]

Troubleshooting guide for DVD

This guide assumes you have any version of Microsoft Windows and a DVD-ROM or DVD-Burner drive on your computer. It requires a quick install of a free diagnostic utility.

Discs may be "bad" for a few reasons. The most common ones are:
1. The disc is fine. It's your player that's being uncooperative.
2. The disc has a bad spot on it and is defective. Use this free tool to check out the physical disc integrity:

Download NERO CD SPEED here:
http://www.cdspeed2000.com/files/NeroCDSpeed_210.zip

It is an executable file inside a zip. There is NOTHING to install. This one file does all that is needed. Simply save it on your hard drive somewhere, unzip, and then double-click unzipped file to run. Saving it and unzipping onto your DESKTOP is probably the easiest.

Start the program and go to EXTRA and then select SCANDISC



This window will appear:



Enable SURFACE SCAN only and then click START.

When it is done, red means the disc is bad, yellow means it may or may be bad at that spot, and green means good.

Note: this just scans the physical media. A good disc may not play if it was burned improperly or has out-of-spec video data on it. And not all players will play all media.

[tompika]

Or use DVDInfoPRO. Most of us have it anyway... www.dvdinfopro.com

[jgandara]

I usually check the test checkbox when buring with nero, but it takes some time. Which one it's faster?

[lordsmurf]

I usually check the test checkbox when buring with nero, but it takes some time. Which one it's faster?

Nero verification is known to fail and report bogus read errors. Because of that I never use it. I don't trust it.

[FulciLives]

Well this is all well and fine but what exactly is the "deal" with read errors?

For instance a few days ago I posted asking about this. I had two discs that had many read errors ... all at the very end of the reading ... near the end (outer edge) of the disc.

The thing is one of the DVD discs has problems playing. I tossed it. The other one seems to play back OK in the 2 different model/make DVD players I tried it in.

Also both were NEAR to be full but not competely. Both were DVD back-ups using DVD2ONE set to custom size of 4350 which is a good 100MB or so less than the MAX size.

Also I have some discs (same back-up proceedure) that had no READ ERRORS and other discs (the 2 I mentioned) that did. Same brand from the same batch. These are the Certified 1x-4x BeAll DVD-R discs (from MERITLINE.COM)

So back to my main general question. How many read errors are OK or acceptable? Would that be 0 or just a few or what?

I've since decided to try and keep my DVD content just under 4.2G if I can ... the discs that had READ ERRORS didn't have any until *roughly* the 4.2GB mark (on towards to the end).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I used DVDInfoPro for doing the READ ERROR TEST

*** EDIT ***
I mentioned that I brought this up in a THREAD a few days ago but no one ever responded to it ... except one person who, like me, was wondering the exact same thing. I'm surprised no one picked up on this THREAD.

[lordsmurf]

Zero is what you want. If you get read errors, but the player ignore it, then you're okay for now (just realize it could further degrade in the future, but then again maybe not).

I refuse to accept read errors. I re-burn.

[hedstrosity]

USUALLY one bad sector will freeze the dvd player....this doesnt happen in all cases, sometimes it will pixelate, chop and skip till it makes it through depending how many bad sectors there are....
IVE NEVER come across a case where nero showed perfect sectors and it skipped on a dvd player...
imo this is the best tool to use. ive never understood why people used the nero data transfer test and looked for dips in the graph to see if its good or not... that doesnt tell you anything.
1 bad sector and to me i will reburn. ive never had a bad sector with ritek g03 (donr at leat 200 so far). i had a bad batch a long time ago and use to badmouth ritek, but now i swear by them....
lead datas almost always get bad sectors after 4.0 GB and princos probably 1 in 20 will get bad sectors at the end...
take the extra time ans scan your discs....
this process is not a memory hog, or cpu dependant, so it can be run while your burning another dvd (assuming you have a reader and a writer)

[freestyler]

What really pisses me off is when the vobs are fine, but some of the IFOs and even BUPs are corrupt. After the disc was burned, I opened them in notepad and they were all blank

For Example:

I can play all pieces of video (by using PTT search functions), but the menus are jacked and freeze my player when I hit the Play/Enter key on a button.

Kept happening on a batch of CMC Verbatims using DiscJuggler on an AO5. Burned the same title in Recordnow and got the same problem with the same discs. I'd had enough and made a disc image of the VOBs and burned it in DVD Decrypter and my disc worked fine.

Wierd eh?

[movie freak]

so what software should you use to see if you have a bad burn?