fws dvd-r discs

[taximan]

does anybody use these discs.i,ve been told they are trhe best cheap discs around but i,m gettin picture and sound bearkup about an hour or so into my movies.does anyone else have this prob.??
they work fine in my computor though.
which discs are the best to use if these arnt the best???

[Fredrick]

Ritek

[marscable]

i second that... :^)

[andydd]

Yeah..Ive used lots of FWS although recently ive had skip n freeze on me recently... At the moment im using Datasafe Classic..these seem VERY popular at the mo and I really like em..Although they are only advertised as 1x they burn at 2x too.. If you are in UK u can get em for £0.89 ! at www.blankdiscshop.co.uk

[garryheather]

My experience of FWS (1x) media is they seem to cause skipping and other playback errors near the end of the disc. If your project does not go anywhere near the outer edge then they are fine.

I have burnt pretty close to the rim (to within about 200M) on data projects and they're fine, although the read speed does slow down due to the amount of re-reads required to get the data off. So if you have say an ISO or NRG image as a backup then that's probably going to be OK, but for video use I'm not convinced.

I can not say I've had a lot of problems with FWS because I'm using the batch I got for general data use, however I did use roughly 10 or so for video applications and most of them had problems near the end of the movie. The bitrate wasn't particularly high on any of them, so it's not as if the player was having trouble reading the disk generally and the extra whoomph caught it out.

My discs are burnt with a Pioneer 104, my reader is a Matsushita SR-8485. My primary DVD player is a Sony DVP-S535 (I have tried these discs on several other DVD players from other manufacturers and they all have had problems reading the discs at the same point give or take a minute or so either way).

I have been very impressed with the "ICE" white top DVD-'s from http://www.blankdiscshop.co.uk/ and they're cheap at £0.63 each ! No problems with those at all. I also have had success up close to the rim with their white top Choice Media, but they do not seem to be stocking those at the moment.

These are only my findings of course - has anyone else noticed the FWS discs seem better suited to data than video ? Trying them on a few players suggest the media is flaky near the edge, but I could have just been unlucky with the batch mine came from.

[Niceone]

i got a batch of 50 fws, i had the same problem towards the end of the disk with some of them, for a different reason i changed my burning program from nero to recordnow max and i havent had a single one thats done this.

Of course if you werent using nero this is completely useless and i apologise :P

[garryheather]

I use both Nero and ULead's DVD Movie Factory, depending on application. But it's definitely the media - I have never had any problems with Nero and the same project on a different disc is fine.

I don't see how people can blame the software because a disc is flaky near the end - unless of course it's an MPEG coding problem which only becomes apparent after a certain point, which I suppose is feasible but very unlikely. If the writing application works perfectly to start off with or smaller projects then you have to consider the media or even the writer having problems as the laser assembly moves down the track towards the edge, or nasty spindle bearings introducing a wobble to the media that gets magnified as the laser assembly gets nearer the outside edge.

If you leave the settings alone in Nero as the defaults for each project type you should not have any problems, but if you start tweaking them away from that then yeah, you might have problems. But I can not report any such compatibilty problems with Nero, nor do I know of anyone else who can.

Don't forget the software has little to now impact on the write quality - speed of burning, the quality of your writer and the firmware in it in addition to the media itself will impact on the quality but the software (unless it hangs up or has naff memory management that means it's cache is inappropriately utilitised and inefficient, of course) will NOT compensate for discs that haven't had a uniform, quality layer of dye spun onto the blank. If it's thicker than it should be nearer the end for example, even with running OPC you're pushing your luck in getting a quality write at the end of a poorly manufactured disc. Your software will not compensate for that.