Is My Writer Shot or Is It Something Else?

[NewNightX03]

Strange problem came up yesterday and I'd like to solve it before I lose any more DVD+R's to coasters. I've been backing up my stuff for a long time so I know what I'm doing, and this popped up out of nowhere yesterday and is very baffling. It seems that any DVD I now burn has unreadable sectors at the very same point on each disc.

My problem is strange in that I followed all my normal steps to rip/compress/burn and everything seemed fine. No outward error, or problem. The rip to HD was smooth as silk with no errors or anything of the like reported. The burn to DVD was smooth as well. Burned in the same time as usual and no errors or anything else.

Whenever I complete a burn, I run a small utility called VSO inspector to verify my completed DVD. This is where the trouble starts. Now it seems that every disc I burn (I have tried 3 different ones so far) has errors at the very same place. The VSO inspector reports errors on the discs starting at around 95% of the verifictaion scan. I don't believe the problem is in the media I used as I used two different brands of blank DVD's to test after this started. I also don't believe the problem is in the discs I am ripping from as I have tried 3 different ones. The only other thing I can think of is that the writer has gone bad. Only thing with that is as I said above, all the steps go fine and report no read/write errors of anykind..AND the fact that the errors on the burned DVD's are coming at the same spot at approximately 95% and up.

Has anyone heard of a problem like this before? Why would all the steps of the process go as they always have and now render discs that are bad after 95%?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

[jtoolman2000]

Do they play al the way through without any stutter or freezing, specially at about the same location of the disk according to your scan?

I never bother to scan as my backups are for me and so as long as they play on any of my players, scan results are sort of moot to me.

Now if I am producing a project for a customer, then I might worry a bit more, but still, the golden test to me is playability and not scans.

Forgot to add that id the errors appear to be in the exact place every time, then it probably is a mechanical problem pointing at the burner itself.

[bugster]

Recently, one of the movie studios (Sony I think, but could be wrong) started to produce some disks with deliberate bad sectors. These were referenced in the IFO's but not actually part of the movie or extras. This was an attempt to defeat ripping software by introducing errors like this. Is it possible that you could be seeing this or something similiar?

Have you run the scan on the source disk to see if similiar/same errors exist there?

[NewNightX03]

[quote="jtoolman2000"]Do they play al the way through without any stutter or freezing, specially at about the same location of the disk according to your scan?

Hi..They stutter and freeze at the same location as the scan. Right after I did the scans I loaded the burned DVD's and all is great except at the 95% mark when they freeze, stutter and refuse to play.

[NewNightX03]

Have you run the scan on the source disk to see if similiar/same errors exist there?

Hi. I am running a scan on a source disc now but I'm pretty sure it will run ok as I also put the source discs in and tried to play them at the spots where the copies were freezing and stuttering and they played fine. Seems the originals are fine...

I'm stumped other then that my drive is going.....EVEN though it ripped fine.

Thanks.

[Gurm]

It could still be media. If it's always at 95%...

Try getting some KNOWN GOOD media, just one or two discs, and burning at a lower speed to test.

If you get Taiyo Yudens or RICOHJPN's and burn at 4x with no buffer underruns, and THOSE discs mess up at 95%, then you have isolated the problem to your burner.

[samuraijack]

Hi,
I just recently solved a problem like this with my own system. I use NERO and DVDdecrypter depending on what I need to do. The problem came about one day when DVDdecryter just kept failing at certain sectors and complaining. I used NERO to do the disc and it came out fine, But not after wasting a few dvd-rs. I later discovered that the problem came about when I had used NERO before using DVDdecryptor. Something in the nero aspi didnt want to give up and stayed around to mess up the burn. I rebooted and tried again and DVDdecryptor works everytime. Then just for the fun of it, I did a sim-burn with Nero and then a sim-burn of DVDD. It failed almost at the exact same spot.
Check your layers.