Sent from my iPhone On 29 May 2010, at 15:04, John Carmonne <[email protected]> wrote:
The disk is not the issue it's the weak drives in the PBs.
With DVD burning, there are a number of factors that will affect the resulting success rate.
1) quality of the drive. As John says, weak power level to the laser will cause bad/unreadable disks. 2) disk type. Most DVD burners will handle both + and - discs, but many prefer one it the other. The trick is knowing which ones your drive prefers. 3) power if the machine. Aka "grunt". If your computer is older, the thruput over the IDE bus will be slower and this will cause buffer underruns at higher burn speeds. A buffer underrun is where the buffer in the DVD drive has no data left to write, because the computer can't push thecdata to the drive quickly enough. More modern drives will attempt to recover from this (using "burn proof" or similar), but this is not ideal, and can cause failed discs an coasters. When you burn a CD or DVD the data is written in a constant block. Data discs are generally burnt DAO (Disc At Once) rather than TAO ( Track At Once) so the entire disc needs to be burnt in one go.
My tip is reduce speed if you are getting coasters. If the drive us rated at 8x, try 4x then 2x. If 2x fails, try a different program and different media. Don't necessarily always stick with cheaper brands of DVDs as that is asking for trouble. Find a brand and config that works and stick with it.
Are you trying to toast DVD movies or burn music and data? The movies are almost going to have to need a good powered drive, I know some will dispute this but I do a heck of a lot of DVD burning and I hate coasters.
Movies are data discs. There's no real difference, save the DRM. Data discs usually get written as one session and DAO and that is what might be the issue, as noted above.
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