OT: DVD brands and how yours stacks up

Julius_ wrote on 2/2/2015, 8:48 PM
I usually burn bluray disc but for small projects and dvd copies for clients I've been using Ridata for over 10 years (it used to be another name before). I must of burnt about 2000 dvds....today a few clients came back because their dvd freezes a few seconds or skips (I did copies for them based on a dvd they gave me).

AT first I didn't believe it, but when another client also complained a red flag went up. I burnt one myself and this time I decided to watch the whole dvd (normally I just watch about 4-5 minutes to know that it works)...after all I've burnt about 2000 dvds! The little bugger of a DVD skipped on me! The setting was 6,000,000 and burned at 8x (dvd was capable at 16x). So I try another DVD and another...all with problems!! I was freaking out! How could this be? Maybe my burner?

Then from another batch of DVDs that I had, I tried a different brand, and burned the same project and voila! Worked like a charm!

I did some digging and found out that after all these years, the Ridata brand that I was using is a crappy 2nd blend quality...and the Taiyo Yuden that just saved me is a premium quality brand.

There's nothing more unsatisfying than having your good work being judged on its media....lesson learned. Buy the good stuff!

See how your dvd brand stacks up here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

Comments

PeterDuke wrote on 2/3/2015, 1:39 AM
I have always found on the few times I have come across them, that Ritek/Ridata is an inferior brand.

Be warned, if you did not already know, that the manufacturer's name is often different from the brand on the box. To check the true manufacturer, you need software such as Nero DiscSpeed, and of course you have to buy it before you can test it!

The Ritek Wikipedia page lists some brands (including Verbatim) that have used Ritek made discs at some stage.

I would stick with Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden (JVC) DVDs, but I have had Verbatim labelled discs made by CMC Magnetics (DVD-R when Verbatim only made DVD+R).
PeterDuke wrote on 2/3/2015, 2:31 AM
So far as the report you quoted goes, unfortunately such data can get out of date and there is no date on the report that I can see. The links to the forum are broken.

From this page http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/media/ I deduce from the 7th sticky post that the report was posted on Dec 16, 2010. However there is a note re Sony DVDs saying "as of January 2011", so the latter may be a revision date.
Richard Jones wrote on 2/3/2015, 4:22 AM
I have always used Sony VD-R discs bought from Amazon but the link Peter gave is a little alarming even though I have never had any problems with burning to the Sony discs (hasty touching of wood at this point), The only fail;ing I've ever had was the one time that I tried to burn to a Verbatim disc which somebody gave me but I had no idea about its provenance so it might just have been a 'one off.'

It would be nice if we could find some sort of up-date to the review given in Peter;s link, Does anyone know of any up to date research on the subject?

Richard
rs170a wrote on 2/3/2015, 6:02 AM
I used Verbatim until I discovered Taiyo-Yuden (now JVC) and have been using the Watershield brand exclusively for several years. Colour printing on them is beautiful. Thousands of DVDs later and never a complaint from anyone.

Mike
Butch Moore wrote on 2/3/2015, 2:50 PM
Shortly after switching to DVD many years ago, we settled on Taiyo Yuden (JVC) media. Tried other brands and knockoffs, but have always been disappointed. We've burned thousands of discs, both individually and mass production and have never had a related return when using the Taiyo Yuden (JVC) product.

Although I'm not technically versed to explain why, we have always burned DVD's at 4x speed, no matter what it says on the box! Master at 4x - Duplicate at 4x. Keep the bitrate at or below 8,000,000. It just works...for us!
Arthur.S wrote on 2/4/2015, 10:33 AM
I used Verbatim for a long time, then ran into problems. (apparently there were a lot of copies around at the time). Tried Taiyo Yuden (JVC) and was the exception to most reports. About 30 duds in a cake of 50! My supplier changed them, but once bitten...
I now use Falcon media 'smart guard' exclusively. BD-R, DVD+R DL and DVD-R. Never had a single coaster on any of those, plus a beautiful print surface, and much cheaper than TY.
VidMus wrote on 2/4/2015, 3:30 PM
"...that Ritek/Ridata is an inferior brand."

Maybe I am super lucky or whatever but I have been using the white hub printable Ritek DVD's for years now and get excellent results with them.

I thought I had bad ones at one time but it turned out to be a burner problem instead. Actually, I had a bad SATA cable to the burner.

There might be a different source manufacturer for the various types with each brand. So that might be why I am getting excellent results. Also, maybe the Ritek's like my burners and not the burners others have.

I think a person should find what works best for their burner(s) and stay with that.
videoITguy wrote on 2/4/2015, 4:27 PM
the slam against Ritek Ridata - is quite uncalled for. What is true, and has been known for years - although few customers buying optical disks seem to grasp.

An optical disk is a formula embedded in a complex manufacturing and quality control process. Not a whole lot different than making canned vegetable peas from the standpoint of what has to arrive in the customer's hands. If the farmer sells his peas to the canning plant, the peas can be sorted and graded. Then top quality arrives on the store shelf as Grade A with highest price point, while lesser grades make the discount grocery shelf.

Ritek is just a branding - and who makes - you may be surprised to know are well known good manufacturers. The reason for disk variablity and process at burn time has mostly to do with handing, environs, burn control firmware, and condition of the burner. ALWAYS do quality control when burning disks.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/4/2015, 4:42 PM
If you don't test your discs, you are flying blind. Even if you follow the advice given in this thread, you will still be open to having problems.

You can read 1,000 threads just like this one, filled with anecdotes. These anecdotes are useful for pointing you in the correct direction, but they won't ensure success. Yes, if you use Taiyo-Yuden/JVC (premium, not "value") or Verbatim, you should be getting the best media, but some suppliers sell fakes, wittingly or otherwise.

So, after you open a new batch of media, test the first burn using CD/DVD Speed, or a similar tool. It you get a low error rate, you have a good burn, and your DVD will play on just about any DVD player, not only today, but probably many decades from now as well.

If you don't test, you will get unpleasantly surprised, just like the OP found out.

If you are doing this work for a living, you must test your discs.

VidMus wrote on 2/4/2015, 5:16 PM
I always use Nero to burn the disks and can click on a box to verify them. So after the burn, the disks will be verified to check that they can actually be read.

This will not check the quality or anything like that, but at least I know they were burned well enough to be successfully read.

videoITguy wrote on 2/4/2015, 5:23 PM
Folks, this has been covered a 1000 times as john suggests. There are some very specific quality control steps that will verify and quality control your burns. Pre-test is good - especially with the built in test app of Nero. Post burn tests, with other tools, do a checksum, do a random read on various platforms. Take into account that all burns and reads are ultimately controlled by error correction handling - the parameters of which can be defined with sufficient random tests across a specific media batch.

This all takes a lot of time, but if you don't do it, you are flying by seat of your pants finally into trouble.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/4/2015, 7:57 PM
No, no, no, no: verify does not tell you anything useful about the burn quality. If the disc can be read, it will verify correctly, but it could have an error rate 100 or 1,000 times greater than normal.

All digital media has errors, and all media uses error correction to mask those errors. The test I linked to actually measures the errors, before correction, and therefore gives you a scientific insight into whether the disc has a large number of errors. The more errors, the more likely that a client's DVD player might not be able to play it all the way through without freezes. The more errors, the sooner the natural aging process will render the disc totally unreadable.

My advice is to not bother with doing a verify, because it doesn't tell you much.
videoITguy wrote on 2/4/2015, 9:07 PM
John, you just did not read or understand my post - above - I covered your concerns quite nicely. Several versions of Nero Ahead software bundles include a special burn test - which takes a given media and writes the disk for an evaluation mode. This is a two step process by definition and is meant to eliminate the variable of different errors of correction that might occur in multiple passes in the read.mode - although in fact it cannot simply do that in practicality.
But it is a good evaluation for burn media - but always follow up with media evals and checksums on subsequent working discs - just as I stated.
PeterDuke wrote on 2/4/2015, 9:22 PM
johnmeyer referred to a free tool now called Nero DiscSpeed. http://www.nero.com/enu/downloads/

However, in order to see the soft errors before error correction, you must have a BD/DVD drive with the appropriate chipset. Burners made by LiteON have it, but most others don't.

I use a Pioneer for burning and a LiteON for checking.

For DVDs, you see PIE standing for parity inner error. These errors are corrected by inner parity provided that they are not too great. If they are, then you get a PIF or parity inner fail. This is passed to another parity check where the PIF becomes a POE, standing for parity outer error. These are corrected by outer parity unless too great. In that case you get a POF standing for parity outer fail. This is a hard error and you have some unreadable data.

Rules of thumb I have seen are that PIE values should be less than 280 but usually they are of the order of 20. (In my early days, I got over 100 with Princo!) POE should be about 4 or less. If a burn exceeds these, I may burn again, but I am flexible depending on the circumstances.

Note that a read error is a function of both the disc and the reader. Just because one reader reads a disc without error it does not follow that all readers will.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/4/2015, 10:16 PM
+1 Peter. Great post.
musicvid10 wrote on 2/4/2015, 10:20 PM
"Just because one reader reads a disc without error it does not follow that all readers will."

+1

Julius_ wrote on 2/4/2015, 10:35 PM
Thanks for the great tip!

I just downloaded Nero Discspeed and installed.

I read the docs, but I'm a little unclear on what I'm suppose to be looking at and what values?? I don't see a PIE value...
What should the DAE quality be at for low errors?

I ran with the default setting and got this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3xlv1wofgrbjdr/DVD_test.jpg?dl=0

Also, this takes time to run (5 minutes or so per dvd...ouch)

Thank you for your help!!!
John_Cline wrote on 2/4/2015, 10:50 PM
Not all drives report PI/PO errors.
PeterDuke wrote on 2/5/2015, 12:14 AM
" don't see a PIE value.."

As I said in my post, your burner has to have the necessary chipset.

If it does, the startup page will have a series of tabs: Bench mark | Create disc | Disc Info | Disc Quality | Scan Disc.

If it doesn't, the Disc Quality tab will be missing. In that case, buy yourself a LiteON burner. They are not very expensive.
Arthur.S wrote on 2/5/2015, 11:32 AM
Just curious. How do the DVD replicator companies check? When I used to do wedding fairs, I'd order 100 copies of my demo DVD for each fair. I'd be surprised if they were checked individually. I did 4 wedding fairs a year for about 10 years. Never heard of a problem, but then of course I probably wouldn't hear back from someone with a dodgy one!
videoITguy wrote on 2/5/2015, 12:44 PM
Arthur, replication is a process where a proofed master is created - then the individual release copies are stamped out - not burned. This eliminates one of the biggest problems with burn tech - namely the variables that appear in the burn process itself - see my earlier two posts above for context.

However, a stamp master does have its own achilles heel - namely if there is a defect in the master, you will get thousands of defective copies. AND it has been know to happen. Ever find a music CD at Target that sounded weird and you returned it for a refund or exchange credit?

As far as counting the error stats as Peter mentioned - there is a subset appropriate to each type of optical disc, whether you are testing CDRom, DVD, and now Blu-ray - the type of stats differ .
Arthur.S wrote on 2/22/2015, 9:21 AM
So, what are these telling me, that the disc is perfect??

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/94686734/Screenshot%202015-02-21%2007.31.20.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/94686734/Screenshot%202015-02-21%2007.31.57.png



videoITguy wrote on 2/22/2015, 11:01 AM
Arthur no disc is perfect - you just don't have a Rom-drive manufactured with the correct control chip to interface with interrogation by the software. Your drive reader is useless for stats measure.
Arthur.S wrote on 2/22/2015, 12:07 PM
That's what I thought. But why then doesn't the software tell you that? This is the drive's benchmark test:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/94686734/Screenshot%202015-02-21%2007.32.48.png