As mentioned in your other thread, our GE 1101PAs are pretty picky too.
I originally tried Ricoh JPNR01s +R discs I got as Memorex and Sony branded at Wally World.
We would occasionally get slight pauses, but more often we got random pixilation.
At that time I was made aware of KProbe (error testing program for LiteOn drives) and started running it on my discs - I noticed that although my discs were within the PI of 280 and PO of 32 that the KProbe author recommended, it seemed that the discs with PIs higher than 200 and/or POs higher than 12 or so were the ones I was having problems with.
I adopted tighter testing standards - I reject anything over 150/10. However that was causing me to have to reject many many discs and frankly I didn't like burning things, testing them, rejecting them, reburning them, retesting them, on and on.
I went on the hunt for better discs, first up were some TY 4x +Rs I bought off of eBay. They read out as TY discs, but I think they were seconds or fakes as the die on them appeared uneven in color, they had scratches, etc.. They would burn better - within my new tighter specs, but still gave problems during play back (again, mostly pixilization).
I also tried book typeing these media to DVD-ROM, but it didn't help.
A friend then said to try some Ritek -R G04s as he'd had great luck with them on his LiteOn burner. WOW! They burnt at PIs of 20 or less and POs of 4 or so consistently! They played beautifully on anything I put them in!
Unfortunately after several happy months, Riteks started being inconsistent for me this fall - I got spindles that burnt fine and some that were marginal to sucky. I switched to TY 4x -Rs and they were expensive, but they burnt very well with PIs around 40 and POs around 4.
Recently I couldn't get any Ritek or TY 4x -Rs, all I could get was 8x. I tried some Ritek G05 8x -R and they sucked. I tried some TYG02 8x -Rs and they start out with a high PI - around a 100 and quickly taper down to around 10 withthin the first quarter of the disc and they stay low to the end. The POs are 5 or below. The discs play flawlessly in our players, so that's what I've been using (and TY has came down in price to almost the same level as Riteks - which is actually cheaper in the long run as I hardly ever have a coaster with TY discs).
Soooo, the moral of the story - use quality consistent media that will give you good burns. Next see if it'll play in your players, if it doesn't try another media.
If you'd like to try some TYG02 -Rs drop me a PM and I'll send ya a couple.
On another, more maddening note, my parents have a Mintek DVD player and it would play the error rate discs without issue! My borhter has an old Apex 700 and it would play anything, including those high error rate discs! My father-inlaw had a GE 5 disc player and it was really picky (pickier than ours!). He bought an Apex 1200 after Thanksgiving for $28 and it plays anything thrown at it.
Oh well, having a picky player makes me buy quality media and only accept good burns, so that's not all bad . . .
I'm looking forward to playing with my 1620 when it arrives - I'm going to give a go at +R media again as it appears this burner will burn them much better than my LiteOn ever did.
Good luck in your hunt!
-Bob-
