SOT: format BD-RE's!

vtxrocketeer wrote on 1/14/2013, 8:33 PM

This should be a best practice for ANYONE delivering DVD or Blu-ray discs, but I almost went insane today before settling upon it. I always keep a BD-RE and DVD+RW on hand to test burn my finished projects. (I burn iso images in ImgBurn.) This is far better than wasting discs on projects that need tweaking.

Now today, I burned a test to my BD-RE that I bought many years ago and for the first time it stuttered horribly in my Oppo set top player. Huh? These things are supposed to withstand thousands of burns. Was it my Blu-ray burner, media, player, iso image?

Here is the solution: format the BD-RE (or DVD+RW). Done. ImgBurn does this. It just zeroes out all sectors. Once I did this, I burned my project and played it to perfection.

So, use rewritable media before final burns, and format that media regularly.

Now the world can get back to spinning...

Comments

videoITguy wrote on 1/14/2013, 9:56 PM

It is more complicated than that. Formatting is unique to apps and also to the burner hardware. If I take disc to format in burner 1 , it might not be seen by burner 2 over the same track path. Hence burner 2 could report the disc full or disc empty..it all depends.

Note how DVDAPro is built to handle this issue - if you format in burner 1 that is also connected to this app, the app itself will still insist that the disc is full of data, but if you execute a burn as forced to this app, it overwrites the disc anyway - supposedly in the correct way that the disc will be read by most disc set-top players. I have found that DVDAPro handles this "secure maintenance" issue rather well.