Worst DVD media ever - Courtesy of CircuitCity

[acid_burn]

Do you know where they were made?

Last year I bought a 100 pack of Memorex 16X at BB on sale for $17. I had used the Memorex 16X ones before and they had all functioned flawlessly. The only difference I could see was the fact that they were made in India. All of the other discs I had ever bought were MIT (made in Taiwan). Out of the 100 every one burned fine but was not recognizable in any player...not even the burner that created them. :-x
Needless to say it was an expensive excersize in trying to save a few bucks. Live and learn and buyer beware applies here...

Sounds like the cheap house brand made in China (like 004m crap) had only plays back in the original drive and is unreadable after a few months.

Memorex has changed it's products. The DVD+R the one's I'm seeing now don't have the "rw" logo after it. Oh watch-out some of the labels still have it, but the disc inside may not (BestBuy). Or the label and the discs have it and the 16x, but disc will burn at 4,6,8x (CircuitCity). But at least the the second group played back without skipping or pixialating (dvd vob) .
I've ask Mem for an explaination twice, no reply.

add after a week they replied with "rw" confuses customers but no comment on the quality. But the Memorex reply came from HP support and the letter said Memorex-Imation.

[[_chef_]]

Worst media?

Talk about Princo crappo.......

[lordsmurf]

TDK outsources to CMC & RITEK which IMHO is crappy media.

Do people ever get tired of the hyperbole?
CMC MAG AE1 and CMC MAG E01 can burn better than TY or Verbatim. If you can't burn it well, your burner sucks.
CMC MAG AM3 is average but decent and stable media.
RITEKF1, RITEKF16, RITEKP16, and all 16x Ritek media are fully stable. The RITEKG05 fiasco is ancient history.

This is the dumbest, most clueless thing I've read on this site in year. It reminds me of the "Princo is the best media" threads.

CMC and RITEK are the worst offenders when it comes to unreliable media. It has very little to do with the burner. Even the best burner will not magically make crappy media good.

Nexxtech is basically a "house brand" for Circuit City, and uses whatever cheap or fake crap can be barfed under the label. It should be avoided at all cost, along with most other brands.

If you want to buy media in stores, only buy VERBATIM (Singapore, Taiwan, India) or SONY (Taiwan only). Everything else is basically crap these days.

[orsetto]

Those who rail against the concept of "crap" media and blame the burner are only seeing half of the picture. The blank DVD media debacle is caused by two opposing mfr camps: the media makers and the burner makers. The media makers are in a scramble to use the least amount of raw material and still have a functioning disc. CMC, now making 2 out of 3 discs sold at retail, has a particularly annoying tendency to "adjust" its dye spread and formula every few months.

Brand-new accessory PC burners are designed to handle these endless variations, because the burner mfr knows the unit will be installed in a PC with a wide range of uses. PC-installed burners can also often be firmware-updated to cope. So, those who exclusively use a PC and reasonably new burners can indeed get "flawless" burns on the newer, weirder, cheaper media. The story is VERY different for users of standalone DVD recorders or other devices with embedded "proprietary" burners: the burners are older and are not equipped with firmware that can work around the new cheesy dye formulas. They stall, crash and fail. And not always because they are obsolete: there are brand new consumer products (like the popular Phillips 3576 recorder) whose burners do not have a thousand embedded strategies and "psychic" abilities. You can buy one of these at Wal*Mart today and easily have it barf up a CMC-made TDK disc tomorrow. Why? Because consumer hardware mfrs want to shave costs just as much as the disc mfrs, they don't want the expense of putting a 'future-proof' burner into a $250 recorder. They cross their fingers and hope an "averaged" strategy for half a dozen disc types will cut it. It doesn't.

The whole situation is a mess.

[ron spencer]

here we go again.....more home brew discs...still with name brand

[lordsmurf]

I'm not aware of any DVD recorder that is not using a normal DVD burner inside. A DVD recorder is nothing more than a dedicated mainboard, a micro-sized power supply, a DVD burner with the computer chassis, a tuner soldered to the board, video in/out ports, and a basic in-out MPEG capture chipset for a CPU. A few have USB on the motherboard, no surprise, or Firewire.

I'd ripped open pretty much every DVD recorder there is (at least in this country), and I find the typical assortment of burners: Optiarc, Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic, LiteOn, NEC, etc. In many cases, I've swapped a drive to test. Very often, yes, the burner worked "better" because the drive inside the recorder NEVER had a single firmware upgrade from the "version 1.0" level.

But a crappy disc was still nothing more than a crappy disc. There's nothing magic about the hardware that will make a cheap disc (which often uses pathetic goo for dye materials) burn well.

[[_chef_]]

crap in - crap out.