How can I figure out how to stop burning coasters?
June 6, 2010 8:45 PM   Subscribe

How can I correctly diagnose my DVD burner problem?

I've been burning DVDs for a while on this machine, friends of mine do a lot of video editing and production work and I find myself making copies now and again. The burner is probably four years old maybe? It's old enough I can't remember when the heck I bought it.

The problem I have is that playing DVDs back on a tv-set dvd player results in that corrupted coloured-blockiness that splashes onscreen for a second or two, like when a satellite feed is losing signal or something. This I could tolerate, but other times the player experiences something like a full skip, jumping to another place on the DVD.

I noticed that when I track back to the part of the disc that presents the problem, and play it again, it'll usually go through the second time. This leads me to believe that the errors are perhaps not encoded explicitly on the disc (via a faulty dvd burner) but maybe the DVD player is having trouble reading the media.

So I guess I have a question or two, hoping someone could help me out: would it help to burn the DVD at a slower speed? Is it possible that reducing the burn speed will give the laser more time to burn the bits into the data layer, resulting in a more stable data track? Or am I just spouting B.S.

Beyond that, I'd expect that I'd try using different DVDs (I've been buying stacks of Philips DVDs because they're cheap) but SHOULD it turn out that these first two solutions don't work, is there any way I could "clean" the dvd burner somehow? Is it worth it? Or should I just buy a new one?
posted by geodave to Technology (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Yeah try burning at a slower speed. If it doesn't resolve it you might need to get a cleaning disc (they do make them, they have small brushes glued onto the underside for cleaning the lens).
posted by msbutah at 9:05 PM on June 6, 2010


You're burning single-layer DVDs, right? You could try a different brand of blank disks, and be sure to set the burn speed yourself. Software often tries to burn at max rated speed, which is usually a rather, um, optimistic number. Try burning at half the rated speed or less. If, worst case, you can't get good burns out of your burner, we live in an age of excellent and cheap name-brand DVD burners. You can pick up a new one for under $30.
posted by exphysicist345 at 9:47 PM on June 6, 2010


My best advice is to not buy cheap media. I'd been using Memorex DVD-R for a while with excellent results. When I ran out, I picked up some Staples cheapos and every single one failed to burn properly. I replaced them with a great deal on Sony DVD-R media at CostCo ($20 for a 100 disk spindle!) and have not had any issues at all.

At the very least, you could try out a higher quality DVD and see if that alleviates your problems. But yeah, also burn them slower and that should help too.

Not sure about cleaning a DVD/CD drive aside from a cleaner disk as mentioned above. I'd be tempted to use compressed air to blast out the inside (probably best to do this outside as the dust plumes can be rather nasty!).
posted by fenriq at 10:02 PM on June 6, 2010


Try some Taiyo-Yuden media.

But really, yeah, just get a new drive. They're like $23 at newegg. I've seen this myself where recorders just kind of start to peter out after a number of years. Maybe it's optical misalignment, maybe something else, but they're so cheap new that it's hardly worth getting worked up over.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:18 PM on June 6, 2010


Best answer: Apart from burning different speeds/brands/types (-R or +R) of media, you might employ CDSpeed or Nero Discspeed, to test your discs for errors and burning quality..
posted by unmake at 10:50 PM on June 6, 2010


Response by poster: Just wanted to follow up: Turned out that PIO was enabled and not ultraDMA mode, so it was choking on an overused processor and screwing up the burn.

I discovered that by running tests with CDSpeed, so thank you unmake!
posted by geodave at 9:32 AM on June 10, 2010


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