DVDInfo Questions. Taking forever on errors

Blank Media Disc Testing Methods and Software
#1

Hi there, I have searched a few forums with no luck,
I hope someone here can help me:

I have been getting a few dud burns lately; movie will freeze up / go choppy at any stage during playback, very frustrating when watching with friends.
I’m guessing it’s down to my media: OPTODISCR004

Q1:
When checking burnt discs with DVDinfoPro, when it finds an error (red block) it gets stuck for over an hour! It’s not frozen as its still recording errors in the little window; I had to stop it at:
662. Error –LBA. - It could have taken all day!
Is there anyway to speed up this process?
What other software will reliably check my burnt copy for possible playback errors?

Q2:
How do you tell where the errors are in the disk, so that you can check them on your DVD player to see how bad they are? All it gives me is a sector number, e.g.: 175020h – How do I find out what this is in minutes? Is there other software that can do this?

Q3:
One more question that I might as well post here:

Sometimes when I make an ISO image with DVD Decrypter, my drive sounds like its spinning really fast, and then it will make an image in about 5 minutes!
Every other time (99%) it will take around 30 minutes.
How do I make it fast like this all the time?

Sorry for the long post.
Kelly

Drive: Pioneer DVD-108 – Latest Firmware
XP Professional

#2

it was down to bad media, but if anyone can answer my other questions that would be great. Thanks, Kelly

#3

Kelly, you have been waiting quite a long time for those questions to be answered, so here’s my attempt at answering (some of) them:

Nero CD-DVD Speed can do the same thing in several ways, using e.g. the Transfer test on the Benchmark tab or the Read test on the ScanDisc tab.

This will only show you whether the disc is readable in the drive you use for testing however. It may or may not be readable in other drives or players.

Q2:
How do you tell where the errors are in the disk, so that you can check them on your DVD player to see how bad they are? All it gives me is a sector number, e.g.: 175020h – How do I find out what this is in minutes? Is there other software that can do this?
I can’t think of a really good and easy answer for this one.

If you’re up for doing some calculations with e.g. the Calculator program in Windows, you can enter the hexadecimal number (175020) in Hex mode, change to Dec (Decimal) mode [number changes to 1527840] and divide by 512 to get the size in MegaBytes (2984 MB) and divide by the total (used) size of your DVD (e.g. 4482 MB for a full DVD5 but it could be another number) to get a fraction (0.665) and multiply it with the total playing time (e.g. 120 minutes but it could be different) to get an aproximate position (e.g. 79.89 min ~ just before 80 minutes).

Q3:
[…]Sometimes when I make an ISO image with DVD Decrypter, my drive sounds like its spinning really fast, and then it will make an image in about 5 minutes!
Every other time (99%) it will take around 30 minutes.
How do I make it fast like this all the time?
Sounds strange - I have no idea.