Bad sectors when burning DVDs with Toast Titanium

[Akominatus]

Definitely a newbie question coming up... When burning movies (mostly .avi files) onto DVDs with Toast Titanium 9, one problem which crops up fairly often (perhaps on one in three or four DVDs) is than on playback, the image will suddenly start "stuttering" and then freezing, so that the following few seconds or sometimes minutes can not be viewed properly, or only in bursts; the rest of the DVD then plays normally.

Some additional background to the problem:
1. I burn the DVDs late at night, with no other application running;
2. I use the slowest writing speed allowed by Toast;
3. The media used are branded, good quality DVD-R disks;
4. Power outages or fluctuations shouldn't be a problem, as the computer is on a UPS.

I'm aware that one occasionally gets bad sectors when writing DVDs, but surely a 1:3 partial failure rate is too high? Or is it?

[terryj]

1. Is the media made in 2007 to 2009, or is it newly bought off the shelf media?
if new, update your Toast to the latest patch for up to date Media Firmware for your burner.

2. You don't specifically say, but I assume that your using the internal DVD burner,
an not an external one? If so, how many DVDs do you rip or burn in a day? A week?
a month? may be time for a new drive replacement if the number is pretty high.

3. The media you are making DVD out of ( .avis), are they stored locally on the internal HD,
or on an external HD? Did you play the files in Quicktime ( or MpegStreamclip) with Perian 1.2.1 installed to verify
there were no "bad spots" in the files before burning?
What happens when using Quicktime ( or MpegStreamclip) with Perian 1.2.1, and you export
the avi files to DV Stream format, essentially "flattening" the file for easier use of transcoding?
Does it hiccup or throw an error? if so, then it is the .avi file that is the issue.
if not, what happens when you burn the completed DV Stream file to DVD-R?
does it playback and "stutter" or "Freeze"? if so, then it is your burner, and you ruled out the
avi file.

post back and let us know....

[rumplestiltskin]

I found Toast 10 to be totally unreliable on my Core i7 iMac running Snow Leopard; I mean almost 100% failures no matter what I was burning. Once I upgraded to v11, the problems disappeared.

[terryj]

I found Toast 10 to be totally unreliable on my Core i7 iMac running Snow Leopard; I mean almost 100% failures no matter what I was burning. Once I upgraded to v11, the problems disappeared.

YMMV rumple.
I'm running Toast 10.0.8 on my Quad Core iMac 27" i7 ( Late 2009)
with an external Samsung Burner via USB and it's been great. Running
it under SNL 10.6.7 also if that helps.... before ran it at v. 10.0.6
under 10.6.5 and it was running fine as well....