Best burning app/method for DVD?

[stantheman1976]

I've used Nero for a long time and had no problems. Now I'm working on a 2 disc project and have burned 4 copies. On one copy of disc 1 a 30 second credits clip I made skips. On two copies of disc 2 the disc is unreadable. I'm using Taiyo Yuden inkjet printable blanks ordered from newegg. Are there any obvious reason I might be having problems?

[louv68]

Does the problem persist with a software player such as PowerDVD or MPC?

You may want to give ImgBurn a try. I gave up on Nero ages ago.

[stantheman1976]

I'm using ImgBurn and I think that solved it. I've burned a couple copies of each and they work fine. Looks like I'll stick to it from now on for anything important.

[stantheman1976]

Is it common to still have failed discs using TY discs ImgBurn? I've burned about 20 copies of what I'm working on and am checking each disc after I burn. I just had one that showed a successful burn but it wouldn't play in DVD player or PC.

[oldandinthe way]

Media and software are not the only reasons for bad burns.

Your hardware installation could also be a problem.

Is the drive a recent install?

Did you install a new 80wire IDE cable when you installed the drive? Many new drives require an 80 wire cable. CD-ROMs and older slower drives did not. If you bought a raw drive and did not replace the cable it could be the cause of intermittant success.

Is this an older sytem or a manufactured system with a low wattage power supply? An inadequate power supply can lead to intermittant operation on the DVD burner.

Is your drive a USB drive? Running on a USB1.1 port can cause bad burns. A crappy IDE-USB converter in your case can cause bad burns. The chipsets used in some external cases are crap.

Were you running other applications on the system while burning? CPU intensive applications while burning can cause buffer underruns and bad burns.

Is your burner a piece of crap or dying? Some burners aren't very good on day one, right out of the box. All decline with age. If you were using other than TY media I would suggest trying a firmware update but every drive I am aware of has a write strategy for TY. Owners of some drives consider a 5% failure rate decent performance.

I'm not surprised that ImgBurn wasn't a fix for your problem. ImgBurn is a great piece of software. Its advantages over Nero are not in the area of getting a drive to burn to completion. Its advantages over Nero relate to the greater ability to read an Imgburn burned movie on a failing DVD.

[louv68]

It may be that the DVD's you've authored aren't 100% compliant. Some players are forgiving, some aren't.
Try running one of the projects on your HDD thru FixVTS. Then burn and test again.

FYI - I haven't had a bad burn with ImgBurn in a very long time that wasn't my fault.

*Edit* Everything "oldandinthe way" said as well burn speed. Many factors can affect the output.

[stantheman1976]

I just had another one that won't play. It was my laptop that both were burned on. It just seems odd that most are working fine but one or two occasionally won't play.

[oldandinthe way]

One more thought

If you are burning 20 and verifying DVDs in a short period of time your drive may be overheating.

[oldandinthe way]

Your laptop is more likely to have heat issues.

Some laptop drives are pretty awful others quite good.

In my experience laptop drives are limited to 8x burning. Some media do not perform as well at lower speeds than their rated maximum on some drives.

You need to identify the drives in your machines which are giving you problems. Also the processor and speed of your machines. Many duo core laptops are really slow machines when it comes to burning, because burn programs only use one core and most other programs which you might run use the same core.

[stantheman1976]

I'm suspecting it's the laptop drive more likely than the desktop. I was burning disc 1 of a two disc project on my desktop and disc 2 on my laptop to make it go quicker.

I'm using a Toshiba Satellite laptop with 1.6GHz core 2 duo and 2.5GB of RAM. The internal drive is a Hitcahi. My desktop has a Sony drive and an HP lightscribe drive. I'm using the Sony for burning.

[oldandinthe way]

Hitachi DVDwriters are made by a LG-Hitachi joint venture and in my experience are pretty good. Indeed you should not be running any other programs when burning on your laptop. For burn purposes it's slow. Heat could be an issue. If the more you burn the greater the chance of failure it'd be my guess.

On your desktop depending on the age of your drive the SONY and the HP could be from a variety of makers. Both companies rebadge, and not all of the drives they have rebadged are of equal quality. Some of the SONYs are unreliable based on posts by owners in various forums. There are definitely major disagreements among owners of Optiarc built SONYs as to quality, and the SONY rebadged Lite-Ons seem to have greater complaints than the same model with a Lite-On badge and firmware.

[stantheman1976]

There's no telling. I've burned a bunch on the Sony and they verify 100% and burned two on the HP and both showed errors during verification.

[stantheman1976]

An update if it might give more insight. I've burned a bunch of copies on my desktop with th Sony using ImgBurn and verifying each burn. All have gone 100% both burning and verifying. Sony seems to be going like a champ. I've burned about 5 or 6 on my laptop with the same method and on 2 ImgBurn would try to start verifying but kept popping the disc back out recycling the drive and the disc was unreadable. I know heat was suggested for the laptop but can it be general heat from the whole thing? The drive shouldn't be overheating because I'm burning these off and on while I'm doing other things around the house so it will sit for a time before I burn another. Is it that laptops just aren't meant to burn in quantities? I really want to believe that I just got a batch of TY discs that some might be bad. How likely IS that?

[stantheman1976]

Another thing I never mentioned is the laptop is running Vista Home Premium. What are the chances that ImgBurn might be getting screwed up by that? Probably high?

[jman98]

Laptops have poor ways to get rid of heat and it certainly is possible that a laptop could have too much heat buildup. I've had ImgBurn give a weird problem right at the beginning of a burn with a good Verbatim disc and I just used my other burner and it worked fine. I had burned several discs previously, so it could be heat.

TY discs are sometimes bad. I like their discs, but I did get 1 out of 100 pack that was defective and you could get see bad spots on the disc. 1 out of 100 isn't shabby at all, but I just wanted to point out that even TY is not 100% perfect.