How Many Coasters Did You Make While Learning?

[tgpo]

Learning VCDs, 11-20
Learning DVDs, 1

[jameshgross]

None I read the guides on the site and used DVD-RWs

[twilightzone]

Hey tgpo,
I loved crystal pepsi when it came out. Wish they still sold it today.

[tgpo]

Hey tgpo,
I loved crystal pepsi when it came out. Wish they still sold it today.

I can remember drinking one when I was young. It would have been around the time I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. It was weird drinking something that tasted like Pepsi, but looked like water.

[naturalzinc]

yuk...i remember it being nasty...but then again im not a real big fan of regular pepsi :P

[jeex]

from my own mistakes? 3.. i tried burning a dvd movie with nero, checking the settings over and over and over.. nero just couldnt create a disc that would play on my pioneer.. it would play on other dvd players, but not on the pioneer. so then i burned with recordnow max and it worked just fine on all dvd players..

the moral of the story: stick to nero for cd burning, stick to RNM for dvd burning.

[ghoster]

used rws starting out

[ZAPPER]

HA!
Thought that you could fool me huh? It is a trick question! We are all still learning! If you ain't making coasters you ain't trying anything new! And even if you ain't trying new stuff you are bound to screw up somewhere. A high coaster count doesn't mean you are not learning it means that you are trying to learn more! (or a no coaster count means that you are smart enough to use RW)
Personally I guess some where in the 20's, but I haven't had that many attempts really. I've got an old system and nothing really worth saving, but I try little bits and peices now and again just for self abuse.

[glockjs]

my first 25 pack, it was crap media so is that really my fault? this stuff was bad, i mean naked geek bad.

[Boolean]

0 coasters. Use RW for learning.

[Tom Lewandowski]

Been making SVCD's for two years. One coaster before thinking of using CD-RW's first.

I've only been burning DVD's since January 2004 and haven't experienced any coasters yet...knock on wood. Always use DVD+RW and DVD-RW when experimenting with something new.

[lordsmurf]

Almost 3 years of burning (August or so). At least 100 coasters through the days, if not more. But probably 5,000 or more perfect burns. I don't really keep count. I just do the work, burn. Good ones go to clients or in my collection, bad ones go in trash.

Remember, we didn't have guides in the "stone age" of DVD.
It would have been nice, that's for sure. Heck, most of us "pioneers" wrote the guides you use today.

Those RW discs used to cost $20 or so.
Never really used those too often.
DVD+R/+RW was still a pipe dream of the alliance.

Just cross your fingers and hope it worked.

[mats.hogberg]

Well I made 1, trying to persuade Nero to produce a playable VCD, but have since refrained from touching Nero, scanning source for bad frames, and using RWs until I have the process down, and haven't made a coaster since.

/Mats

[NightWing]

Hum.... No zero entry?

When I got started the price of burnable CD { no RW then } had droped to 50 dollars a disk from 80 dollars a pice. Yes 50 dollars EACH! Out of the first box of 10 had zero. Software was garbage that Philips had included. But had no coasters.

[pyrohydra]

When I first started burning CDs I was writing on them with a ball-point pen. It took me a couple days to figure out that was destroying the discs, and I had made about 5 coasters using this method.

When I first got started with DVD burning I had no RW media, so I made several coasters by stupid mistakes (field order wrong, etc). I would also buy cheap CompUSA media (Optodisc) rated 1x, and I would burn at 2x. Most of the burns worked but some had costered. Looking again at some of the ones that didn't coaster, and it looks like the burns were bad after all (small specks on the data area).

Now, I buy 4x Riteks and burn at 2x, speed not being critical to me. And of course, I use RW media to test, especially when I'm trying out new processes.

[indolikaa]

Ah, the power of rewritable media.

[KingSeti]

Have to go on the same lines as jameshgross, none! I printed out the guides and read them and re-read them then tried and had instant success. Thank you to everyone who post's on this site as I do alot of reading and learned alot from everyone's posts. Does "write error" or "burn failed" count? If so I have had two of those!

[Rookie64]

Never made any coasters learning (and still yet) DVDs, VCDs or Audio CD-Rs

When I started DVDs, I followed lordsmurf's burning guide for Nero, and it's the method I stuck with.


Only coasters I've ever made were a few data CD-Rs...which were either due to a faulty hard drive or bad media.

[gcutler]

None I read the guides on the site and used DVD-RWs

Thats what I did. The only messups I had were luckily on RWs, any Coasters I had were bad media or hardware or Software hiccups.

But thats not to say that I don't want to go back and reauthor my earlier DVDRs because I would like to do them better.

[thor300]

The first DVD media i burned was RW, still had some coasters later on because many -R disks failed to verify when burned at 4x, and a few because of mistakes in authoring software and so on, not having problems now when using mostly +R media and burning -R at 2x. I hope a 107D will stop the -R problems, that will be my investment in a (hopefully) no-coaster future. When i was still doing VCD/SVCD, lots of coasters, did lots of experimenting that time and had no RW disks. CDs are cheap anyway, not a concern.

[DivXExpert]

When I started there wern't that many guides. And I was doing DivX. My first VCD was with FlaskMPEG and i accedentally made all the setting for PAL, rather than NTSC. 1 coaster.

[TheFamilyMan]

I've made a few unexpected using CDRs that my burner did not like. I made about 3 dozen "good but worthless" test VCDs, SVCDs and CVDs while I was figuring out the best recipe for making home video into these. My DVD player would not reconize CDRW, so I simply had lots of wasted disks. When I switched to DVD-Rs I had no coasters thanks to DVD-RW. All of the CDR based projects I made I have since trashed because home movies at low bit rates look terrible, so my total "expected" coaster count is about 75. A few of these are early DVD-R projects that I was not happy with once I got my DVD sea-legs.

[racer-x]

The next coaster will be my first!

Well over 1000 disks and NO coasters, I guess I'm batting a thousand.

[Thorn]

CDs: started out with the ricoh 4x flashed to 6x... took me a few coasters to figure out that Easy Hard Drive Eraser (easy cd creator) was the only software causing those blue screens of death and ruining the cd AND that portion of the hard drive because it was incompatible with my drive. Win98 and fat32 made it worse, but I've never been dumb enough to use adaptec (Roxio) to burn again.

DVDs: I got a batch of real TDKs that always failed to verify when burned at 2x, but were happy at 1x. All other 2x media (including fake TDK) burn happily. Dunno how people can get 100% unless they're lucky with media - all it takes is one bad batch.

Other than that smooth sailing... except for that one coaster due to a buffer underrun on a CDR (back when you could still do that).

[impmon2]

I've been burning CDs since (I think) 1999 and I didn't get my first coaster until my CD burner died. I have had 3 other mis-burned CD-R since then and those were my fault (incorrect setting on 2, bumped the computer on 3rd one)

I've had made more coaster out of DVD+R (6 this year and counting!) because I keep forgetting to check the #%$@$ setting and it ends up readable only on PC and not on DVD player.


I'd like to know why it seems the more expensive the media, the more likely it'd end up as coaster.

[NightWing]

Any one else been burnning CD since 1992?

Use to get a Microplus 1.3 gb full size HD, burred in a 486 DX 50, getting it very hot feeding a Philips CD 521 burnner drive. Darn CD burnner drive thing was bigger than a DVD Video recorder!

[lordsmurf]

Not that old, but I do remember when 1 CD could hold my whole hard drive, and I always worried about buffer underruns on the 1x SCSI drive !!

I think I had just gotten Win95, having just come out. Used either PRASSI or Nero, I forget.

[NightWing]

Well this beast could to 2x back then! Had to get setup two full size SCSI card. I think they were 1520 or 1521b. A long time ago! One for the 1.3gb and the other for the burnner. All in a micro case!

I think it went for between 5k to 8k dollars new and the DOS bases software was a beast that was super rude & crude would be way too kind to describe it! When I saw it at a Summer CES. ! wanted to break the plastic case and haul it back with me but found out it was an empty box inside!

I think Philips was also showing the dumb DCC tape system that went nowhere.

[lordsmurf]

I remember the software I used was touted as the "software that killed DAO", which was the bitchy DOS software of the day for burning.

"My" burner was always borrowed from a friend's parent back in those days. He always joked he'd use my car a collateral if I ruined his drive ... sadly the car probably cost less.

I hated making $2 CD-R coasters. Especially after waiting 74 minutes.

[Redeye07]

5 coasters - CD-Rs when I first started and I couldn't understand the software. There was different software for R and another for RW.

3-5 coasters learning VCDs

3 coasters - Memorex DVD-Rs bad media. Changed to Fuji and never had another coaster.