VSO media reliability statistics

[mats.hogberg]

A little interesting to find that the "4TH CLASS MEDIA: Pathetic garbage media, landfill material, about 0-50% success rate" CMC MAG (that I've personally avoided like the plague) shows up as one of the most reliable media out there (~95%)!
Also the very small success rate difference between media - has the general media quality level risen lately?

/Mats

[jimmalenko]

A little interesting to find that the "4TH CLASS MEDIA: Pathetic garbage media, landfill material, about 0-50% success rate" CMC MAG (that I've personally avoided like the plague) shows up as one of the most reliable media out there (~95%)!
Also the very small success rate difference between media - has the general media quality level risen lately?

/Mats

Either that or that stats may be skewed.

ie. The stats may only be for those people who don't realise that they're allowing the software to phone home by opting in for stats collection, and also the success ratio may just mean successful burns. It says nothing about successful play.

The one thing that surprised me was how low the success statistics were. 95% success means 1 in 20 burns (or discs) is unsuccessful. I may not be the norm, but I would consider 1 coaster in 100 acceptable as a minimum, and readily achievable with my Pioneer 111D and Ritek G-05s. To see that there's a number of media and drives with less than 90% (1 failure every 10 burns) success rate is a bit of a worry.

[Joe Ryan]

I believe the "fourth class" tag comes from digitalfaq with its outdated and biased sorting of media. Most of the problems with DVD discs and drives are due to disc/drive incompatibility, not quality. Just because a disc shows a bad recording from a drive does not mean there is anything wrong with either the disc or the drive. A great deal depends on the compatibility of the two, and that depends on how widely a drive manufacturer supports different media on the market. Disc quality is determined by expensive equipment not readily available to the consumer, not by seeing if the disc works or not. The class rating is based on a fallacy promoted by technically unkowledgeable sites such as digitalfaq. (Can they explain how Verbatim/Taiwan is considered a good disc and CMC is not when CMC makes the Verbatim discs? Don't let the MCC MID code fool you--that indicates the stamper used, not the factory in which the disc was made.)

Compatibility is improving steadily as brands are putting pressure on both manufacturers of drives and of media to support each other. This becomes easier now that the speed race has hit 16X and fewer new MID codes hit the market.

[OneSickPup]

(Can they explain how Verbatim/Taiwan is considered a good disc and CMC is not when CMC makes the Verbatim discs? Don't let the MCC MID code fool you--that indicates the stamper used, not the factory in which the disc was made.)

I've always understood the agreement between MCC/MKM and CMC to be more of a lease of manufacturing capacity. The manufacturing line and much of the workforce is CMC. The dyes, materials and technology is MCC. Management including quality control staffing is all MCC. I may be mistaken so don't hold me to that. Also, not all MCC media is CMC. They also have similar arrangements with Prodisc (Taiwan) and Moser Bauer (India), not to mention their own facilities even though that media rarely makes it to the US.