Help with playback issues

[Mustangous]

Ok, I have been reading a lot about this disc stuff and first i would like to say that this site has been a great help.
Ok heres my situation, I have been making backups for a while and never really had problems until a couple of months ago. The Problems i was having is that when i playback a dvd it gets that digitalized look in the screen and freezes. This is with a memorex dvd-r 4x disc and with no label. So after a lot of backups i decided to stop because all i was doing was waisting media and time. So i found this great site and found out that it could be bad media. also i used to put labels on my disc but i ran out a long time ago and have been just using a sharpe. So after reading here i decide to also get a epson R320 printer and Taiyo Yuden printable discs. So i was hoping this would solve my problem. Well after setting everything up and making a backup the playback is much better but I still get some pauses in the audio and sometimes i get the digitalized screen(for a sec), but much much less then before. It doesnt freeze like before and i have to start the movfie over, but its still really agravating.
Ok so heres what i have:
3 or 4 year old gateway laptop - 1.13ghz 256 mem
Lite-on burner - 810s <- i think thats the model
Taiyo Yuden - media
I tried the discs on a old Yamaha dvd player and a phillips dvd/vhs all in one player.
And i also tried the playback before printing on the discs too. oh, and i use clonedvd for my backups...maybe ill try shrinkdvd later...
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am thinking it still might be the media but i doubt it.

[Mustangous]

sorry.. maybe i should of put this in the dvd to dvdr...

[ROF]

I'd start by saying that doubling or quadrupling your RAM will help all aspects of that system. This probably is not effecting your burns but will significantly improve all around system performance.

I'd also say that if multiple media is showing the same issues and the burner is otherwise operating properly you may want to look into dual layer backups. More than likely you are shrinking the movie or movie and extras to allow them to fit on a single layer disc. I recommend against doing this as you will have issues where discs play today but don't tomorrow. Play great on some players while showing what your experiencing on others plus a multitude of other problems.

Most people who back up media are doing so to preserve their original while at the same time enjoying the same quality of the original. Shrinking reduces this quality. Anything below 80% shrinkage seems to start showing up with what you are experiencing. You burner doesn't support dual layer but fortunately a good dual layer external burner will only run you about $70 - $80. It would make for a nice christmas present for yourself.

[Mustangous]

Yeah i was thinking about the dual layer burner. I am in the process of actually researching to build a new computer just for video and keeping htis laptop for printing and email, interent ect... But as for the shrinkage i useally just copy the movie only. I am not usually interest in the other stuff. I buy the movies just for the movie. But sometimes with just the movie i have to shring it 60%. Thanks for your input ROL.... maybe ill try another program for shirnking and burning and see how that works... Thanks again

[ROF]

60%?

That's why. You are removing almost half the quality of the original. Even on standard definition televisions of the miniature kind(< 30") this type of degradation will show up as skips or missing audio sections, blurred action, lock ups of the player, and more. I'd definitely recommend dual layer for those types of burns.

[whitejremiah]

i know this probably will seem borderline painful (i know dvd burning is already a rather slow process) but drop your burning speeds, it may fix a lot of things...but at like 1x or 2x speeds.....other than that, it sounds like your burner may be dying out on you......couldnt say for sure, and honestly, as far as dvd burning, i'd recommend at least 512mb of ram and like a 1.5ghz processor...it slows down my 2ghz machine pretty signifcantly....

On a side note....no, it shouldnt cause a dvd player to LOCK or PIXILATE or anything else of that nature, backing it up to a single layer disc...this is a hardware problem, not a problem with compressing it down to a single layer disc...ive had some dvd's with 5 hours of video on them that ive crunched down to a single layer disc...the picture quality, obviously, had something to be desired, but it never locked, pixliated, ect..........

[Mustangous]

hmm... so i gues my next step it to work on building a machine with dual layer burning capabilities. Thanks guys for your help. Much appreciated...
Troy

[Mustangous]

well i just tried a backup with 95% compression with the new media(Taiyo Yuden ) i got and i have the same problems... I have done some really compressed backups in the past and they worked good. I'll have to try and run one of my oldbackups with dvdencrypt and see if it tells me what media. I do know it was a +r though..... would that make a difference??
It even had one of those full face paper sticky labels on it and it works good. The image quality sucks cause that one was really compressed, 45%.

[Mustangous]

OK here is an update....
I decided to run the local store and pick up a different brand of dvd discs... well i looked at the nomorecoasters.com site for a listing of good media. So i picked up a 15 pack of maxell dvd+r instead of the -r i have switched to a long time ago. Well come home to burn a copy of a backup i already made to save on the shirnkage time and low and behold... it plays perfect no problems at all. Now i was like damn, maybe because it was already shrunk, so i was using clonedvd and just hit the write again this way it should be the exact same on the TY dvd-r disc without re-reading the disc and so see if it would work ok now(just trying things..). And it gets all digitalized..
So whats everyone opion? Is it the TY and the memorex disc i have or should i go with the +r now? Also the ty discs are the white printable kind. Could that be a problem? i doubt it, just thought i would ask...

[Prot]

This hasn't been mentioned yet, but you do know you are supposed to print on the disk after you have burned. The printing process can put tiny scratches on the burn side of the disk and this will cause problems during the burn process. Printing after you burn the disk does not seem to cause these problems.

[Mustangous]

yeah thats how i been doing it. Most of the trails i haven even printed on them. So that definitly not it....
Is there anywhere i can get a few TY dvd+r's? I am hoping it is just the -r problem not the brand cause i hear a lot of good things about them so i dont want to give up on them. Its just i have 90 ty dvd-r that i dont know what to do with no cause they aint working for me. I just dont want to spend 60 bucks on a 100 ty dvd+r printable media and they dont work either... I definitly need a printable disc cause i just bout the epson r320 just for that reason.
Any suggestions???

[KBeee]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm
So - you shrank and burned to TY DVD-R media that played "badly", then just exact-copied from TY DVD-R to Maxel DVD+R and it played OK?
If this is the case, it looks like the data was saved OK on the TY DVD-R disk (otherwisae the "faults" would have been propagated onto the second disk), but your player wasn't too happy with the DVD-R media. If at all possible, you could try TY DVD+R media, and see how that goes.
It looks to me like your player prefers DVD+R

[Mustangous]

I think so to but 4 players all prefer +r?? MixSonic Player ms-58 (I got a free with the epson pronter), Yamaha dv-s5270, Toshiba sd-3950, and a panasonic dvd/vhs player.