lousy DVD recordings

February 6, 2007 1:11 PM

Problems with recording DVD's. Do I need a cleaner? or a different machine? I get lousy recordings, some of the time. One and a half years ago I bought a reconditioned Toshiba DVD and VCR Recorder/Player. D-VR3SU/ I basically like it, it was relatively easy to learn how to use it, though that took a while. My old VCR had died, and it made sense to me to go digital, but I have a lot of tapes I wanted to copy. And I was busy. For a while, it seemed to work fine, but many of the copies i didn't watch, so it was hard to tell.

I bought discs from Costco, TDK, and using DVD Media Inspector, as suggested by digitalFAQ.com, I found they are TTG02, supposed to be in the highest quality category.
But more and more often, when I watch something I"ve recorded, it is full of bad spots, no sound, picture breaks up, etc. But not the whole disc. And sometimes it's fine.
Finally , recently I got systematic about watching the discs I record, to get a real sense of what's happening. and I've switched back to tape for temporary stuff, since, inexplicably, the tape recorder stopped seeing all tapes as write protected.
The last two discs,
1-2.5 hours at LP, looks fine for 1st 2 hours, then last half hour breaks up 20 times, then 2 hours at EP, 1st 20 minutes ok, then every few minutes it breaks up, hard to watch tho not impossible.

2. Probably recorded at LP, i'm not sure and can't tell on the player.
1st 2 hours are fine, then the next two, blips started about 23 minutes into it, unwatchable.
So now I don't know what to do. I did some looking on the web and found some DVD player cleaners and also this
searchwin
which suggests they do little or no good.
And it seems like the beginning of the disk is better than the later part,
I can still return this player and start all over (I bought "extended protection" which turns out to be a refund) , but I hate to do it. I spent a lot of time shopping and then learning this one. Ideas,insights? Judy

posted by judybxxx to technology (4 comments total)

In my experience with burning DVDs, I've found that even when the burning application, reports no errors, a good 25% of discs will turn out to be unstable during playback. Of course, I've been burning on PCs, and usually assigned blame for the bad discs to presumed background processes slowing down the PC during a critical phase.

What's interesting to note is that my unstable DVDs, while unplayable in my former dvd-player of choice, original xbox, were often perfectly playable on other machines.

I suspect that even with a different device, you'll still need to QC your burnt discs at near 100% if the stuff you're copying is important to you.
posted by nomisxid at 4:43 PM on February 6, 2007

At a guess, provided your recorder isn't actually faulty, I'd say it just doesn't like those discs. If they're all showing errors from around the 50% mark, I'd suspect the write strategy used isn't suitable for those discs (the strategy - power levels, speed, etc for how the burner actually burns - varies across the disc).

There's a few reasons for this. The write strategy is advised by the media identification code (e.g. TTG02) manufactured into the disc. Besides being next to worthless in itself (it's easily faked, the discs may be near-seconds-quality from the end of a batch, etc), your recorder just may not know that particular media code. If it doesn't, it will fall back to a similar or default write strategy which may not be good enough.

TTG02 is one that is often faked - if you have a good look around, you'll see widely varying reports. As well, it seems fake "TDK" brands discs are common (in the US at least - never had a problem with them in Oz).

It seems spindles of discs are more commonly faked than individual jewel-cased discs, so I'd go out and buy a couple of Verbatims in cases to try. Doing that will minimise the chance of them being fakes, plus give you a different media code (Verbatim discs are usually MCC-something) that your burner might handle better.

(People spend inordinate amounts of time and effort chasing down the "best" cheap discs, discussing whether BrandX from one retail source are the same as identically-branded-and-MID-coded "fakes" from another source, etc, etc. Personally, once I've found which name-brand discs a burner prefers - usually either TDK or Verbatim - I just buy them from the local K-Mart. Never had a problem...)
posted by Pinback at 6:40 PM on February 6, 2007

I’m no authority on DVD recorders, but I’ve burned a lot of disks on a Panasonic DMR-ES25 with zero problems using whatever blanks were handy.
posted by Huplescat at 6:40 PM on February 6, 2007

Now that I see Pinback's coment... I've always used jewel cased disks... two varieties of Panasonic and one of Memorex.
posted by Huplescat at 6:48 PM on February 6, 2007