Lite-On LH-20A1S/L - Post your scans here

SONY D21 is Sony's 16x DVD+R MID, Fuzzo.

And I agree. Slower isn't always better.

BTW, pythonis, you can use the Jitter Tool to set the drive to always scan for jitter at 4x. This will prevent that little "jump" that occurs in the middle of the jitter graph.

thanks. just a couple questions though. whats jitter and wheres the jitter tool? sorry but i just discovered the "scanning" of disks a cpl days ago. never heard of it before then.

Jitter Setting Tool

And jitter is simple, yet complicated to understand. I define it as how accurately the drive makes the pits/lands that make up your data on the disc.

The simplest explanation I found was this: You want the jitter to be as low as possible.

A jitter average of 6 is excellent, 7 is very good, 8 is good, 9 is good, 10 is okay, 11 is acceptable, and any higher generally gives cause for concern. It's one of the factors that determines how well a disc can read back. As I said, lower is better.

In your scan, the little red/pink line stays moderately low, and you get an acerage of around 8% jitter, which is good.

I highly suggest you read this and this to get a better grasp on scanning. It's a lot to take in, but good to know.

hey thanks. heres a question for ya. i know ppl say that when youre burning a disk youre not supposed to go online because it can mess up the burn. is this the same for scanning? also which is the best scan to do? benchmark? quality?

If you use your computer for anything other than [burning/scanning], you can:

[while burning]
-Cause a buffer underrun, making the speed fall back, possibly causing quality issues
-Make the drive stay at its current speed but pause often, causing similar quality issues

[while scanning/benchmark]
-Make a drive miss samples [and seemingly report fewer errors]
-Make it seem like the drive had to slow down to read a disc, making you think the disc is bad

...and some other things.

Doing both TRT/benchmark and quality scan are good, but most of the time one or the other will suffice. There's a debate on which is better here: http://club.cdfreaks.com/f96/quality...e-test-167693/

ive done quality scans where the stated quality is 0 but the picture on the tv is superb. whats up with that? and can the quality ever go up in a scan? for instance if the quality is 0 at 25% completion can the quality jump back up to (say) 85 at 100%?

The QS is based on maximum PIF. If there is a spike high enough, it can make the QS zero, but you may never run into an issue. It all depends. No. Again, the QS is based on the max PIF. It can only go down or stay the same, but never up.

started scanning this backup copy (vacancy) at 8X but went straight to a score of 20. stopped scan and restarted at 4X and i think so far this is the best scan ive ever had.

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Last edited by pythonis; 07-01-2008 at 04:27. Reason: Forgot attachment

I've been experimenting with OHT and FHT to see if the settings make any difference with my Verbatim MCC004 +R discs (the best I've found so far).

The first was burnt at 16x in Nero with OHT and FHT off and the OPC History cleared. Note the jitter was tested at 8x in this scan as I was using an old version of CD-DVD Speed.

For the second, I enabled FHT and from here on the jitter was tested at 4x.

For the third, I also enabled OHT and got a very poor result, as you can see. It does seem to be a bit random though, as I ran it a few times and the spikes at the start changed everytime, anywhere from Max 40 PIE (as shown here) to Max 90 PIE, which obviously brought the score down even more. It was probably just a glitch/bad disc though, as I normally burn these discs with these settings without any problem. Scanning that dodgy disc at 4x gives a QS of 93 (image 4), if I can take any comfort from that I then burnt an ISO with DVD Decrypter without changing any settings, which was fine as you can see in the fifth image.

Hmm, I seem to have a bit of a problem here now.

I burnt this with Nero@16x, FHT and OHT off, OPC History cleared. So the same settings as the burn in my previous post that scored the best (QS 95).

This burn had major issues around the 3GB mark and from 3.75GB to the end and only scored 45!

I then burnt the same files again, same settings and didn't show the same problems towards the end but still had a major spike at the 3GB mark with a QS of 48.

Next, I decided to reset the Jitter scan speed to Default (I'd previously changed them to 4x) but when I tried to scan the first burn again, I got a PIF spike of 30 right at the start, which dropped the QS to 0! CD Speed does seem to throw up random results like this quite a lot. Is this a common problem or is something up with my drive? Anyway, I scanned it again and got much the same results as the first time (QS 43 - Scan not uploaded).

At this point, I decided to go back to CD Speed 4.7.5.0 to see if it made any difference. Scanning the first burn was much the same but scored a little better (QS 50).

I then made an ISO image with Nero but burnt it with ImgBurn and got a QS of 93, which is OK but there's still a spike at the 3GB mark which dropped the score from 95 and which wasn't appearing last week. I've rescanned my best burn from last week to compare but I'll put the results in a new post.

The issue with spikes at the beginning of 8x scans is typical for these drives. We like to use 4x for this reason.

I've noticed some of my Verbatim burns coming out with spikes after a 16x burn, but I used OHT or HT, so I can't really say what's going on. Also, I haven't tested enough to know if it's media or the drive.

OK, so to recap, I burnt a disc on 6 Jan which got a QS of 95 (first scan in this post http://club.cdfreaks.com/1972215-post234.html ). Following the problems detailed in my last post, I took that disc (which hasn't been in a drive since, so hasn't been scratched or damaged in any way) and scanned it again.

The results were a lot worse. The QS dropped to 90 and the PIF max went from 2 to 4 and the PIF average from 259 to 1750! There's also some spikes at 2.25GB and 3.25GB that weren't there last week.

This new scan was with 4.7.7.5 and the previous one was with 4.7.5.0 so I went back to that, only to get a PIF spike of 25 at the start which dropped the QS to 13! I managed to scan it again and got much the same results as with 4.7.7.5, with a QS of 93 and the newly developed spikes in the same places.

Can anyone explain what's going on here?

Doh, thanks for letting me know. I used to always scan at 4x but somehow got the idea that 8x was being used by most people now. I'll have to rescan some of my recent discs and see what the results are.

Okay, I don't know what's going on here. I rescanned the disc from post #237 at 4x and got much the same result, which is still bad because the PIF Total has gone up 7x compared to when I scanned it on 7th Jan (due to the two new clumps of PIFs that have appeared). As it hadn't really changed, I haven't posted this scan.

I then rescanned the 3 discs from post #235 at 4x. The first one shows a massive increase in PIFs in the last GB, whilst the second shows a large increase in the same area. What's worse is that the 3rd one, burnt with ImgBurn and which looked quite decent in the previous scan, with a QS of 93, now shows and explosion of PIFs in the last GB and only scored 25 and just stopped at 97%. The program didn't freeze and didn't give an error, it just stopped.

God I hate computers sometimes. Any help appreciated

Can your drive do a Transfer Rate Test on them and the discs in question not fail? Your drive may just be messed up or something.

JUST messed up! That's the worst scenario surely?

Anyway, I thought to check the DMA mode that my drive was using, just in case. It was fine, on UDMA 5, but my SATA HD was on Multi-Word DMA 2, due to my disabling it from being autodetected in the BIOS when I was installing Linux on another drive. So I sorted that out and thought perhaps that was the answer.

However, I scanned the third disc from post #235 at 4x (the one that scored 93 with a PIF total of 221) and that got a QS of 64 and a PIF Total of 6638, which were mostly in the last GB. The TRT looks fine. I scanned it again at 8x (which was the speed it was scanned at in post #235) and it did a lot better, with a QS of 84 and a PIF Total of 624. It seems strange that I would get a better result at 8x than 4x. Even so, the PIF Total is still 3x worse than it was originally.

I also rescanned the disc from post #234, which still looks much the same, along with the PIF clumps that weren't there a week ago.

It's obviously not a writing problem, or I wouldn't have got the earlier good scans so does it seem likely that the drive's reading ability has gone kaput and I need to get the drive replaced?

You might have to get the drive replaced. Can it scan the same disc 3 times in a row and get wildly variating results?

Well, I rescanned the discs again today.

First I scanned the 12 Jan disc and got a much better result, with a QS of 95, although the PIE Total was a bit higher than the original good scan, the PIF Total was lower.

Then I scanned the 6 Jan disc and whilst it got a QS of 93, the PIE and PIF totals had about doubled and the PIF clump that was at 2.25GB had moved to 0.75GB (the one at 3.25GB stayed there).

Then I scanned the 12 Jan disc again, which did even better, with the PIE and PIF figures being lower than the original good scan. (http://club.cdfreaks.com/attachments...t-fht-off-.png)

Then I scanned the 6 Jan disc again, which was a bit better but still has 10x higher PIF Total than the original scan (http://club.cdfreaks.com/attachments...-cleared-1.png).

So, does it look like the drive needs replacing? I remembered I had another DVD drive lying around so I thought I could see if that was more consistent but unfortunately, it's an NEC-3500 which doesn't do PI scanning

I thought I'd try burning one of these discs at 12x in Nero (still with FHT and OHT off) to see if it helps. I'm pretty chuffed with this result. I still don't understand the changes in the previous disc scans though.

Same disc but scanned with DVD Speed 4.7.7.5 and with Jitter set to 4x.

Burnt with Nero at 8x. Not quite as good as the previous disc burnt at 12x, so I'll stick to that for now. I might try and see if enabling FHT and OHT improves burning at 12x and 16x at all.

This is the second test burn on my 20A1S that arrived this afternoon (the first one burned up to 18x and everything went crazy as soon as speed got above 16x). Stock 9L08 f/w is still installed, but I'll be moving to the patched version once I'm satisfied everything is OK with the burner.

So far, I think I'm gonna like this Litey!

Here's the first test burn with patched 9L08 f/w (fb-eos-eoht). Not a night and day difference, but a little better than results above using the stock 9L08. Once another Verbie MCC 004 or two get "learned," scans may be even better.

I just upgraded from 9L05 to 9L08, should I keep 9L08 or drop back to 9L05??

Two scans, same DVD+R

1st scan @ Max speed: 70 QS

2nd scan @ 8X: 95 QS

I guess I'll stick with 9L08.