Calibrate your burner for Kprobe??

I've seen all these wonderful Kprobe scans with absurdly low PI & PO errors but I never seem to get my scan anywhere remotely close to them -Kprobe always shows tons of errors in my scans (pics follow).

Is there a way to calibrate the Liteon DVD burner?
I get high errors even with commercial pressed DVD-ROMs.
Is there something wrong with my Liteon drive? How can I know for sure?

For the record, I have a 411s@811s with Zebra v4 mod.
And all disc I have burned play perfectly in my two set-top dvd players.

Scan of a single layer commerical (pressed) DVD-ROM

Scan of RicohJPNR01 (Imation) - Burned at 4x, Scanned at 4x

Scan of RicohJPNR01 (Imation) - Burned at 4x, Scanned at Max

Scan of RicohJPNR01 (Imation) - Burned at 4x, Scanned at 2x

I have the same thing, they all appear to be working fine but no where near any of thier k-probe scans, check mine out, some similar results,

You guys might want to stick to 4X/8ECC scanning speeds for comparision with the CDFreaks database.

No matter what ECC setting you pick, the total count will always remain the same. So for comparing PO between KP1 and KP2, I look at the pattern/distribution of errors and the total count, and the comparison works out nicely...

@casperg

Possible causes of the high errors...
1/ You got a bad batch of Ricoh media.
2/ Your drive isn't reading the disc as well as it should (i.e., the disc is fine, but the drive has reading problems... see if the disc works well in other drives/devices... if so, then your drive's reading ability is somehow messed up.
3/ Your system is misconfigured somehow (thus causing bad burns)
4/ Your drive is faulty.

It could be any of the 4...

Your RITEKG04 scan looks quite reasonable (you can ignore that single high spike on the PO graph).

This makes me think that your other media is the cause of your other poor results.

---

Last edited by Jackass; 26-05-2004 at 13:24.

I tried Ricoh from three diff brands - Imation, Memorex and Maxell, same results with all three. So I guess media problem may not be the cause.

I am getting comparable CD-Speed results in NEC 2500 and Pioneer DVD-ROM, so I guess the Liteon is giving bad burns.

Just got a batch of TY DVD-R (Maxell) - will burn one and see if it is any better.

So its either system config or faulty drive. Will tinker around a bit changing IDE channels and stuff....... hoping for better burns!!

Also try using the default Microsoft IDE drivers if you're not doing so already.

Here is a scan of TYG01 I burned today - this is the best scan I ever got from this burner....

Am gonna take it out and put it in a friends PC tomorrow and see if that makes diff. If I get a better burn in his machine, then I will wipe my hard disks and make a clean install of the OS and start from scratch.

whoa hold up.... if the disks play in a player do NOT worry about what the kprobe scans show! there is some suggestion that the drives "burn in" as the eeprom changes after each burn. this means that you may end up with the burner getting to know your media better and burning better as you go.

the burn you have with that ty media is within specs so what else matters if it plays?

Is there actually any proof that this happens? If there is, could you please share it with the rest of us?

Yeah, all the discs play fine in everything I put them in - even the Ricohs which show over 900 PI errors.

What I am worried is about the long-term readability of these discs. I would like them to last atleast a year or two. If a couple of months down the line they go bust, then it is not really useful to me.

In addition to backups of movies, I also do a large amount of data back-ups - mostly digital imaging processing work etc. I would like to get a dependable burner. I had a Pioneer A04 before and the discs Iburned on some cheap Princos two years back still work fine.

Instead of getting a Pioneer or a Plextor, I got an NEC and a Lite-On thinking I will be getting more bang for the buck (two for the price of one) - but till now I am not satisfied.

I am sure I am doing something wrong - so many Liteon and NEC users cannot be wrong. I will have figure it out... I will start with a clean XP install, remove all SCSI, firewire, USB etc channels from my PC and do pure IDE burn from a HDD on primary master to the burner on secondary master with nothing else on the channles..... and if I still end up with a bad burn, off they go on eBay.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Number one reason never to buy anything on the "trash dump" eBay...

OK, I wiped the disk, reinstalled XP and did a fresh burn. Then scanned at 4x - no diff, then scanned at 1x and Max just to see how it goes and the scans were much better.

If I understood correctly, the DVD specs specify the PI and PO error rates for 1X speed. I get good scans at 1x, but they become bad at 4x and again improve at Max.

Anyhow I have decided to stick with this and see if the burns improves over time as a previous poster has suggested.

For those of you who are interested, here are the scans at 1x, 4x and Max.

Scan at 4X

Scan at Max

proof, no... it is a surmise that quite a few people have discussed including code 2^16 and others. in looking at my burns over time some have gotten quite a bit better from when i started but i am unsure if it is media or something else