25 RiData DVD+R DL for $29.99

[jtoolman2000]

Holy crap. You've actually done 3000 DL burns. I would love to see you original DVD library. That is a true achievement. I haven't even attempted one simgle DL burn yet so I got a long way to go.

[GullyFoyle]

Some of those Ridata bad disks are due to user error. rarely is the disk itself bad.

Some user error, yes. Always, with anything.
Rarely is Ritek bad? No.

RITEK media are only successful about 80-95% of the time. In all honesty, these days, and for quite a while now, it's barely able to hold that 80% ranking. These are researched numbers, they're not pulled out of thin air.

Most people fail to understand statistics, so they fail to understand these numbers. For the layman that has 100% success, there is another person that only has 60% success. You cancel each other out, and land in the 80's.

Since I keep my disks I can use an example
Out of the last thousand 16x Ridata's I have five bad burns. Two are bottom disks and obviously scratched. One I'm sure was a bad file. Two more look good but slightly scratched.
Out of the thousand 8x before that I have three bad disks
To me those are pretty good stats.
Many of the burned ones get repeated plays with out any problems.
The real test will come in ten years to check for degradation.

For the layman that has 100% success, there is another person that only has 60% success. You cancel each other out, and land in the 80's.

And 95% of those people with bad burns blame the disk and not themselves or their setups.
Stats are fine if they are detailed, if not they become political poll numbers skewed to how the question is asked.

[GullyFoyle]

I've defended Ritek +R DL media in the past, because I've burned about 40 of them with my Pioneer 108 (including a 25-pack of Memorex), and they play fine in my stand alone players. I used to buy them because they were so much cheaper than Verbatim. Never again.

I recently bought a BenQ 1640, and for the first time, I have the ability to do scans. Just for fun, I scanned a few of those Riteks that play fine. Yikes! I didn't save the Nero the scans, but most had quality scores in the 20s and lower. Many were zeros. Jitter was very high on all of them. (I don't really know what jitter is, but I know that high is bad.) I've started the process of re-burning them to Verbatim (which usually scans in the 80s and 90s for me.)

Just another example of how cheap media is actually the most expensive media (when you have to re-burn to better media).

Let's get this straight despite excellent repeated playback just because you got a new burner you are going to re-copy everything that has no problem?
And that based upon high numbers of something you don't even know what it is?
If everything is working fine why fix it?
I could understand if you had replay issues on at least some players, but you don't.
I never scan anything. Either it plays or it doesn't. As long as it plays why do I need to know anything more?
The only real issue is degradation.

[Caple]

I never had problems with Ridata disks. It's a shame I can't find it anymore around here.

www.newegg.com :P

I can't find any Ritek media in my area either,but the best deals are on the net anyway. All my Ritek DVD±R media i've ever bought in the past came from newegg.com

I live in Brazil. Impossible to buy on Newegg and receive it here

[Mawdryn]

Let's get this straight despite excellent repeated playback just because you got a new burner you are going to re-copy everything that has no problem?
And that based upon high numbers of something you don't even know what it is?
If everything is working fine why fix it?
I could understand if you had replay issues on at least some players, but you don't.
I never scan anything. Either it plays or it doesn't. As long as it plays why do I need to know anything more?
The only real issue is degradation.

Wow! I didn't realize what an idiot I made myself sound like. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I guess I kind of left out some important parts of the story.

First, one of my players, a Philips 642, has always been kind of fussy about playing the Ritek DL disks. If I insert the same disk 10 times, about 5 times, the player will completely reject the disk, about 3 times, it will play but it will be jumpy, and about 2 times, it will play fine. It's very frustrating because that's the player I use the most. Sometimes it rejects the same disk 20 times in a row, but I can usually get it to play eventually. They ususally play fine on my other players. At least I thought they did. (I never actually played every disk on every player, and certainly not all the way through.)

After a couple horrible (zero quality) scans, I tried playing the "bad" disks in a couple players that have played Ritek DL media (but not necessarily these exact disks) fine in the past. Some disks couldn't even be recognized, some played - but jumpy, and some appeared fine (although I didn't play them all the way through to check).

I can't say for certain that the exact same disk used to play in a particular player, and now it doesn't. (I don't keep track of which ones I've watched, and on which player.) In other words, I don't know if the disks have degraded since they were burned. I kind of doubt it. I think it's more likely that the burns were bad from the start (for whatever reason), and I'm just finding the problems now (by scanning them).

I know I made it sound that way, but I'm not simply re-burning everything that's on Ritek or Memorex, even if it is working fine. The process I've initiated is this:

1: Scan disk.
2: If quality scan is better than zero, put back on shelf and get the next one.
3: If quality scan is zero, try playing various parts of the disk in a couple different players.
4: If disk appears to play ok, put back on shelf and get the next one.
5: If disk won't play or playback is jumpy, re-burn disk to Verbatim.

I guess since my main criterion for re-burning right now is playback problems, I could get roughly the same results by doing more extensive playback testing (without the scanning). But scanning is a useful tool. Especially since it checks the entire disk in 12-15 minutes (unattended) instead of 3-4 hours (of full attention). If I get a good scan, I can be pretty sure the disk will play well. A bad scan helps me find which disks are likely to have problems, as well as on what part of the disk the problems are likely to be found.

So far, I've found and re-burned about 5 bad Ritek DL disks out of about 12 tested. That's a failure rate of about 40%, and about half of the other 60% are questionable. I'll re-test those when I get finished with the first round.

For what it's worth, I've gotten a couple decent (over 50% quality score) scans on Ritek DL media, and I found one absolutely horrible (completely unreadable on any player) Verbatim DL disk (out of about 80 Verbatims burned and about 15 scanned).

Anyway, I'm not really so stupid as you correctly pointed out that I made myself sound. But I still stand by my main point that the Ritek media is less reliable than it seemed to me before I had the ability to scan it. I shouldn't have said "never again". (Never say "never".) But I will say that for the foreseeable future, I'm sticking with Verbatim for DL media.

[lacywest]

I bought a pack of 25 RiData DVD+R DL and they did not work well. They would start to skip and lock up around the end of the disk. Also one of my new DVD players that I purchased to work with my HDTV wouldn't play the disks at all.

I have a Sony DRU-7000A burner, and it works fine with my DVD-R 4.7 disks but not with the Ridata DVD+R DL disks. I will not purchase any more of these disks.

Has anyone else experienced this issue?

So far ... every disk has failed ... from my

25 Pack Ritek RiData Dual Layer
DVD+R (DL DVD+R, Double Layer DVD+R)
RiData Blank Media 2.4X
8.5GB in Cake Box
(DRD+85-RDUSA-CB25), $2.50 Each

... from popular website store

The first four from the top of the stack have failed already ... in between the 4 I tried I burned a Verbatim brand and no problem ... tried another RiData and bad burn again.

Program I am using is CopytoDVD with DVDFab Platinum (Express Mode)

The RiData ... don't even burn for a moment or two ... they fail instantly.

Stupid ... why bother making something that don't work.
When I do buy some more DVD+R DL disks ... Verbatim ... needs to be my choice.

[thevoelk]

Holy crap. You've actually done 3000 DL burns. I would love to see you original DVD library. That is a true achievement. I haven't even attempted one simgle DL burn yet so I got a long way to go.

These were at work mostly. Myself, personally, I've done maybe 100. Most of the stuff I burn at home are backups of DVDs that I would be hard pressed to replace, like my Kill Bill imports, some Pink Floyd concerts, etc or the $80 box sets like Band of Brothers, that I think look like crap as a SL. The 3000 is what I did at work, not counting the rest of my group (they have probably done more since I'm part time). Trust me, I don't have the time or the patience to st there and swap out 3000 blanks for myself.

The downside of my original post, which you may have missed, is that most of what I (and my group) do is watched 3 or 4 times over two or three weeks and either locked in a vault or destroyed. I have the projects still saved on a server, but to be honest, some of the original discs I have no idea if they can be read back a year later.

The upside though, is that when a group within our command asks us to make 50 copies to be distributed worldwide, we "bill" them for at least twice the amount of materiel. Which means we tend to have about 30 left over, since we usually get a couple coasters, I or someone else screws up the authoring, or the power goes out when we're using the duplicators. Which means that out of a run, myself and 3 or 4 others get to split 30 DLs for free. I'm still trying to convince work to to buy a few hundred DVD-R DL to try. I figure that there's probably a certain way they need to be authored, like +R DL, to maximize compatibility.

[GullyFoyle]

Mawdryn

Sorry if I jumped all over you. Your detailed post makes more sense.
The problem may be your player not the disks.
I keep my 642 to play only divx. Everything else goes into either a Kenwood multidisk player, my Skyworth 1050p ( still just awesome and my first region free player) or an Ilo R04 for pal replay and recording.
I do notice that some players will not play disks others will. The Kenwood being one that is a tad touchy.
This also tends to spread wear around more than relying on a single player.

[ephesus]

I haven't tried the DL ones, but I've been using the SL 8x Hub Printable for over a year now. They were the best DVD-R's I've ever used with maybe 3 coasters out of 600 burns. But with the latest batch I ordered at the end of November, I'm getting really poor burns with freezing/pixelation toward the end of movies, situations where the burner doesn't even recognize the disc, and sometimes, the burner freezes up at 20%. I've never had this happen to me and I've confirmed it happens on different burners/computers.

I don't agree with those who have used Riteks for long periods of time and have abandoned them because of these recent issues. If you've had perfect burns at extremely reasonable prices for over a year, I think it's understandable for them to produce a bad batch. It happens. I RMA'd the remaining shipment of 200 DVD's I had left with Supermediastore.com for another batch. Hopefully, Ritek has resolved whatever issues they had in this next shipment.

[lordsmurf]

I think it's understandable for them to produce a bad batch. It happens. .

No, it does not happen. There is no such thing as a "bad batch". A "batch" of discs tends to be countless thousands of discs, maybe millions. The "bad batch" excuse is overused on forums online, as it's really just a myth. While you will get bad discs from anybody, the percentage is pretty even across the board, from spindle to spindle. Burners can affect this, but it's usually still the fault of the media. If many are bad now, that tends to means many were bad before, and will be again. People had to learn that the hard way with Ritek once before.

CD-R was crap, G01-G02 DVD was so-so, G03 was decent, G04 sucked, G05 is pathetic, DL is total shit. Do people not see this trend? Ritek is, and always has been, mediocre at best. About 15-20% of every spindle will end up in the trashcan a coaster, at minimum. Some people see less, some more, but it all averages out in the end.

[oldfart13]

I only use 2 DL +R media, Verbatim and Fuji. Good thing Futureshop has the Fuji +R DLs on right now for 3/$7.99CAD. Time to stock up again. Far cry from the 3/$19.99 they were just before Christmas...

[lordsmurf]

For the layman that has 100% success, there is another person that only has 60% success. You cancel each other out, and land in the 80's.

And 95% of those people with bad burns blame the disk and not themselves or their setups.
Stats are fine if they are detailed, if not they become political poll numbers skewed to how the question is asked.

No. Those stats are once you eliminate user error. Bad discs are bad discs, there is no way to escape it. You should not even bother with stats until you eliminate extraneous possibilities.