My DVD burning problem caused by Philips DVD+RW

For some time I've had a problem burning my recorded TV shows onto DVD. The symptoms seemed to be inconsistent, but it appared that when I didn't have to transcode any files (i.e. content was about 60 minutes) then the burn always worked. As soon as the content was more than 60 minutes, the burn would fail during the last part of the DVD write.

After numerous attempts at trying to fix this, it turns out to be a problem with DVD+RW (Philips media) disks I was using and my DVD re-writer (DVDRW IDE 16x).

I think that the DVDs are not correctly erased after using them once. The first time I used them, they would work fine. The second time (after erasing in MCE), the burn would always fail when the content was more than 60 minutes.

As soon as I moved to using DVD-RW disks (Verbatim), I've not had any problems.

Has anyone else seen any similar behaviour?

I think your ide 16x dvdrw is a very cheap one.

Philips DVD media is not good quality anyway. They mostly use Ritek and CMC.
Verbatim is better, and I don't think +RW/-RW makes a big difference.

Actually, I've got a few Philips 4x DVD+RW discs which are either RICOHJPNW11 or PHILIPS041 (mislabelled as Philips 2.4x DVD+RW). These discs are around 2-3 years old. Apart from one that got scratched badly, they still work fine today.

Well, I am not happy with RICOHJPNW11 or PHILIPS041. They work for me, but I should avoid doing quality scans

Michael

PHILIPS041 is CMC anyway...

I'm with you on the avoiding quality scans. I have a two year old (before I started scanning) Philips041 that I have used every month to back up my email (pab and pst), and the whole XP Documents and Settings folder. I have actually used it 2 or 3 times to restore when I accidentally deleted. Imagine my surprise when I ran a scan on it and QS=46 . High PIF in a couple of places caused this even though the overall quantity was low. In my book, any DVD without a POF is a GOOD DISK. BTW, I have RicohJPNW11 that still scan 95 after a year of use (I take better care of them than I did before I started scanning). BTW, I have never had a failure to read or write on either of these types of media (50 pieces from 2 years to 1 year old), unless I physically damaged the writing surface (OOPS).