Recording DVDs

[Groucho]

I have just discovered that a 2 year old home recorded DVD of the favourite British TV series 'Hitchhikers' Guide' is useless. I have also discovered a thread about disk problems from 2006.:{ To lose stuff after only 2 years is quite a shock, and I guess the disk quality has a lot to answer for. VOB number 7 appears unrecoverable with a CRC read error.

In it someone mentions burn speed. How critical is this and is it really worth the painful wait to slowburn to get longer lasting DVDs?

How do commercial products achieve 'longevity'?

[Robear]

Commercial engraving of CDs and DVDs is quite different from what we do at home. A master is burned on a special alloy and then copies are made by "stamping" blanks.

High speed burning used to cause some problem on old DVD burner (3-4 years ago). Also, unless working with SCSI, it is not always a good idea to burn directly from one burner directly to another (disk to disk). The use of a temp file on the hard drive is safer.

Have you changed DVD player since the recording?
Is the disk damaged?

One other thing. I've seen freshly copied DVDs working perfectly until someone put a label on them. DVDs are more sensetive than CDs and an incorrectly placed label can throw the DVD out of balance and makes it impossible to read on certain player.

Hope this helps

R

[Groucho]

I always use the hard drive as stepping stone - yes, it is a good idea. Same DVD ROM a LG4160B, but I have just updated the firmware following some advice on the previous thread I found.

Disc not damaged and label printed onto face.

On non-printables, I seem to be getting good reliabilty from Samsung Pleomax DVD-R8x

The error I was getting was CRC error on the last 2 VOBs and the disc analysis in Nero confirms bad sectors.:{

[reynoldsno1]

The quality of DVD +/-R blanks varies considerably. I use Verbatim disks, and have had almost a 100% burn success rate. They are only 4X disk, take about 30 min to archive and burn (via HDD) but results are good. Still Ok after 1 year....