The Weakest Link is where?

Newbie Forum
#1

OK I’m not going to ask for the best software choice and I’m not going to ask for the best hardware choice - I am going to tell a quick story and ask the question in the title.

12 months ago I bought a Liteon 411 for coying DVDs. I usually like to copy either my own movies to cut out all the nonsense or rented movies so that I can watch at my leisure and not just mid-week when the stock is in.

I’ve used DVD Decrypter and Instant copy for a while but 50% of what I copied to DVD -R (Ritek) were rubbish. (stop in main player GX300)

I then took the action of changing to a NEC 3530 last week as I was sick of this coaster business. I only copy one a week on average but it was bugging me. I tried same software and it again failed on first attempt. It completes copying but then wont play in DVD player (Sony GX300) - stops, skips, blocks etc etc. still using G05 Riteks.

I then moved to use AnyDVD and Nero recode. This again failed on first attempt (using NEC drive and Ritek G05 DVD-R). I was writing at 8x direct to disc.

I then tried writing to hard-drive and then burning to disc. Failed again at 8x. By the way I am now using Nero scandisk to validate and write verify - both fail.

I then tried writing to hard-drive and then burning to disc (still with Nero) at 4x. Gues what ? the first one worked. :slight_smile:

btw - I was using Layer cake R2 as source disc, but I’ve had same issue with 24 season 1, disc 6 this weekend.

Question

My question is therefore is it usually the write part of the process that fails and not the coding part? If so then the safest option is therefore to write as slowly as possible? Thats my question - is the write always the critical link and does using 2x or 4x make sense to keep it as safe as possible?

At least I now have a verify option in Nero - so I can check for coasters before I sit down with the better half on a Friday nite.

Many thanks.
PS. System is AMD XP3000, WinXP Pro, SP2, MSI Nforce 2 MB, 1Gig Ram.

#2

I write at 4X. You may want to delete the Primary and Secondary IDE channels from Device Manager and reboot. Set all items to use DMA mode. Reboot into BIOS and make sure the hard drives and optical drives are set to use AUTO detect. Reboot into windows and verify that devices 0 and 1 in Primary and Secondary IDE channels are running in DMA mode.

#3

It’s possible that you’ve got a bad batch of the G05s. The latest ones I’ve got are not nearly as good as the ones I first bought. Although I must say that until recently the results have been very good. Try a different media - I’ve had good results from ProdiscF01 & CMC AE1. These are in my ND2500 so they might suit yours.

#4

Thanks folks - I have just done another one and worked fine using AnyDVD and then Recode to hard disk and then Nero Experess to DVD. All using max quality settings in recode and 4x writing. This verifies OK and seems to work great. I guess the extra control of Nero has helped.
Thanks for input - I’ve ordered some Fuji +R to try those with bitsetting. I’ll let you know.

#5

Or you can set up a partition just for doing ‘Optical Stuff’ and just keep the BIOS settings as noted unless something else needs a different setting (unlikely) to run.
Hard Disk capacity is cheap nowadays. :bow: :slight_smile: