Difficulties copying a DVD-R

[XL3/\/7]

Well, I wanted to share with you a very strange experiense, regarding copying a DVD-R.

A friend of mine got engaged recently and he brought the DVD to watch it with me. I put it in my XBOX drive but it didn't seem able to read it, so I told him to give me 15 minutes to copy it to a DVD+R with the booktype set to DVD-Rom and it would be fine.

I put the disk in my PC and tried to open it, but it said that the drive was empty. I tried on my 2nd PC which said the same thing. I have Slysoft's AnyDVD running on both the PCs and I tried disabling it with no luck. I tried DVDDecrypter, DVDFab Decrypter, DVDShrink, CloneDVD2 but none would find any data on the disk.
I then tried copying with Nero 7, Alcohol 120% and Stomp's Record Now Max, again with no luck.

I then tried Nero InfoTool and DVDInfoPro to see what they could come up with.
DVDInfoPro was very slow to respond but did give me these results:
Media Information
Region information N/A not a DVD-VIDEO
Media code/Manufacturer ID RITEKG05
Format Capacity Blank Disc
Free Blocks 25133056
Free Capacity 0.02GB(0.03GB)
Book Type DVD-R
Media Type DVD-R

The disk was most definitely not blank, since I could clearly see it had something burned on it.

Nero InfoTool, gave me similar results (Blank RITEK).

Then I tried Nero again to see if there were any tracks to extract this time.
I came up with 3 tracks. The first one was 24Mb, the second one less than 1Mb and the 3rd one 3.2GB(Bingo).

I tried extracting them but Nero wouldn't respond, so I thought I should try Isobuster.
I opened the DVD with Isobuster and there were the 3 tracks again. I tried to extract the 3rd track to an image file and burn it, but I came up with a .tao image I couldn't do anything with. I tried again extracting the 3 tracks using the Extract From-To option and I came up with 5 .ibq files which I extracted again and came up with 4 .vob files and 1 .ifo file.
I didn't bother at all with the .ifo file and ifoedit but I went directly to vobedit and extracted the video and audio files from there. Having them, I opened DVDLab and created a simple movie only project (like the original one was) and that was about it.

Has anyone else encountered anything similar? The DVD surface was scratch free BTW. Is there some sort of protection that will only allow the use of a DVD on a standalone player only

[Baldrick]

Is there some sort of protection that will only allow the use of a DVD on a standalone player only

No. Have you tried on another computer / DVD reader ?

[XL3/\/7]

Like I said, I have tried it on both my PCs. 3 DVD readers in total plus the XBOX

[bevills1]

The DVDInfoPro line that reads "Free Capacity 0.02GB(0.03GB)" usually indicates bad media in my experience, and I'm surprised you were able to see any files on the disk. If you can get Nero to see the files again, you should be able to select Image Recorder in Nero to create an image of the disk and then burn the image to a blank disk.

[CrayonEater]

Well, the fact that the media code came up to Ritek G05 sent up a big red flag in my mind. It's terrible media. I take it you were able to eventually recover everything and reauthor and burn to a new disc. If you did get everything back, you've both learned a valuable lesson - cheap media ain't so cheap. Make your friend at least two copies - one on Verbatim, one on Taiyo-Yuden - and tell him to store one of the copies in a jewel case in a dark, dry, moderately cool place.

[XL3/\/7]

I managed to see 3 tracks with Nero but it failed to extract them, so I used Isobuster for the job.

Thanks for the tip CrayonEater, I will do just that. The thing is, the original DVDs were made by a professional photographer, so the choice of media was his. I usually buy Verbatims, since Taiyo-Yuden are not available in Cyprus. I also prefer +Rs, so I can change the booktype to DVD-Rom for maximum compatibility with older players (and the XBOX).

[Richard_G]

Well, the fact that the media code came up to Ritek G05 sent up a big red flag in my mind. It's terrible media.

I've heard lots of people on here say this but it isn't my experience. In over 500 burns on Ritek G05 I've had not one single failure, but the 8x G05 is getting more difficult to get hold of. I've now started using genuine Taiyo Yuden TYG02 and had 6 failures out of 100 burns.

From this I can only conclude that Ritek send the crap to the US and give us the good stuff but TY do it the other way round!

[XL3/\/7]

I think it's not about reliability when burning, but longevity of life and data safety. If I burn something and it fails, I can burn it again with no worries. But if a crappy media is the reason I lose important data stored on it, it pisses me off.

I have burned 100s of DVDs with very few failures and they have always been my fault.

So... Which is better with the passing of time? Ritec or Taiyo Yuden?

[Richard_G]

As I've only recently started using the TYs, I can't say, but Riteks burnt 4 years ago are still OK.

[XL3/\/7]

As I haven't described the Isobuster procedure very thoroughly, I'm updating this topic with some pics.

When I run Isobuster with the DVD in my DVD writer, I came up with this



I hit make it so and came up with this



... Yes... and this



......



Ok



and eventually got this



Right click on each file and




I only used the .vob files, which I renamed to

VTS_01_0.vob
VTS_01_1.vob
VTS_01_2.vob
VTS_01_3.vob

Then, I used vobedit to extract them and use them to reauthor the DVD with DVDlab Pro.

Hope that helped...