Set-top players are built to be forgiving in many matters of concern for playing discs. For example the reflectivity of the disc surface enters into a variable of how well a disc with a given manufacturer's formula (the Id code you recall) will reliably play. If the tolerance was so tight that only pressed discs would work, a lot of complaints would be here. But that is why from to time to time you DO see complaints about a player won't work with certain discs.

You can even burn a disc with faults in authoring process (as many forum members will testify) that play although perhaps unpredictably.

A burned DL disc will play with a given stutter or delay in the layer switching that may or may not be objectionable to the casual client.
Replication processing has a higher threshold to meet.

No stutter here. I know where the LB is roughly as I set it at a chapter. I tried the discs before I delivered them on 4 different players I had in the house. The simplest and oldest is a portable Shinco player that is about 7 years old. I even played it on two PAL player that I still had from my days in Malaysia. The DL disc is NTSC and it played fine without any stutter between the chapters where the LB would be. I actually watched one chapter before and one after the LB just to be sure. I suppose the player would have a buffer to overcome the LB read delay.

Don't buy Verbatim media made in the UAE. I've been using their DVD-R Aquashield for a while now - it gives great quality glossy images when printed, looks very pro. I've never had a problem with it until now.

All of a sudden, none of the AVCHD (i.e. bluray on DVD media) disks I burn will play in either of my bluray players. I've isolated it to the Verbatim media that I just bought that says made in the UAE on the label. They do play in my computer.

I'm going to see if verbatim has any kind of customer feedback channel, but now I have to look for a new standard medium to use. I really don't want to give up the Aquashield surface but if they won't play....

rocky

Re-do the burn but one speed slower.

Alternative is to try out Falcon Media DVD-R. They, too, have a waterproof glossy version and I like them a lot.

I find non-glossy watershield from TaiyoYuden/JVC to have a more appealing printed finish than high-gloss.
From Meritline.

We seem to have gone off on a tangent about replication. The OP said nothing about that. The Verbatim DL work great when used to burn copies for your own use, and DVDA makes it easy to place the marker in a location that is correct enough for the player to play it.

It is true that DL compatibility is not as universal as single layer, so I would hesitate to use DL media for any project for which you need to distribute hundreds of clients. However, for a single client or for your own use, I don't see any objection, other than the longevity of DL has not been tested as thoroughly as single layer. I therefore can't say with any assurance that you'll be able to read DL discs in 20-30 years. By contrast, I can say with a great deal of assurance, based on science and testing, that Verbatim or Taiyo-Yuden single-layer discs (of the proper media ID) will almost certainly be readable after that time period, and probably well beyond that time.

This is a link to the exact item I have ordered in the past:



It looks like they may be out of stock, and I can't say for sure whether the replacement they suggest has the same media ID.

[edit] I realized after I posted that it might be useful to post the media ID. Nero DVD Speed reports the media ID on my Verbatim DL discs as:

MKM 001 (000)

and DVD Decrypter reports it as:

MKM-001-00

[/end edit]

As far as the advice to burn at a lower speed, I disagree with that. It is based on problems CD burners had fifteen years ago, where the software, burner, and computer system sometimes couldn't keep up with the data rate required, and you would get a buffer underrun. This is no longer a problem. It is also based on problems with some of the early CD and DVD burners and disc formulations which initially did not do a good job burning at higher speeds. This too is no longer a problem, although I have seen some reports at the sites that specialize in DVD burning tests that some 16x media is still sometimes suspect.

But isn't slower speed always going to be as good or better, and therefore, other than taking longer, isn't it true that there is no downside to burning slower? Once again, no. Most modern discs are designed to be burned at the speed printed on their label (if they have one). Based on massive numbers of tests at CD Freaks and elsewhere, slower burns usually result in worse quality, not better. Every single test I have seen confirms this.

I work on the principle that manufacturers in being competitive will claim the highest speed practicable for their products. Any faster and performance will suffer significantly. Thus the highest speed claimed is on the edge of the useful range. I therefore burn at one step back from the fastest just to be on the safe side.

Especially to John Meyer....We have all done this narrative before, but Here I GO again. If you try to evaluate the burn quality with commonly available calibration tools, you should note that you have to carefully set-up the calibration standard - usually 4x speed to get results that you can compare disc to disc, media to media, speed to speed.

Hence say a disc bears a label write speed of 32x, burn it at half that or 16x and test it at 4x playback. You will get an eval of the amount of soft correction errors that you are creating that can be compensated for by most playback equipment.

So here's the rub, if you follow the recommendation to burn at 32x, what that begins to show, is that you are creating more than average burn soft errors, and that in turn will make the disc more problematic for play with an adequate error compensation over a range of typical playback devices.

I have done dozens of tests over the past ten years, using various burners and various blank media. I do these tests every time I have to duplicate 100+ discs and, just to make sure I get the best results, I burn the first set at the rated speed of my discs (8x for the Taiyo-Yuden/JVC discs I use now, as well as the single-layer Verbatim I sometimes use). I then burn at 4x and sometimes 2x (although most burners don't support this). I then test the burned disc in a Lite-On drive that supports CD/DVD Speed. When doing these tests, I read the discs at 4x in order to compare results with tests at CD Freaks and also with my previous results. For a quicker comparison I sometimes do the read tests at 8x, but then I can't compare with earlier results.

In every single test I have done over the past ten years there is no improvement whatsoever -- zero, none, nada -- when burning slower.

I also refer people to these two posts:

DVD Burning and Media Quality Concepts

In the above link, scroll down to the section labeled "Myth of burning slower." I also recommend to others that they read the information in this link because it answers many other questions about blank media.

The other link below is to a post at the CD Freaks. This is a site where hundreds of users test and report on their experience burning thousands and thousands of various CD and DVD blanks, using most of the popular burners on the market:

Slow write speeds + modern drives + modern media = no good

There is similar section at the videohelp.com site, but the quality of those tests is, IMHO, suspect.

For those who still want to burn slower, go right ahead, but I do encourage you to do your own tests with your own media and drive. This is the only way for you to know for sure.

I think this thread should be moved to the DVD-A forum.

I agree with johnmeyer on the burn speed issue. I think RAM matters, at 4GB RAM I had 2 burners that would vary their speed. With 20GB RAM both drives write at full speed with zero disk access. If your drive is varying its write speed, you can tell by a broken pattern on the data side. If the drive is not varying is speed, the data platter will be a single pattern from beginning to end. I build my discs in DVD-A, create an ISO, and then use the windows ISO burner with verify.

One thing I noticed when I did some disc testing with Nero speed test, is that error rates increase dramatically beyond 4GB. Do your own testing, but I tend to keep my disc sizes below 3.95 GB. Not sure why that occurred for me, it could be disc manufacturing, or my burners. I really only use Verbatim, but I would say that the quality of discs have gone way down from a disc 10 years ago. For some reason I still have a small stack of 1x-dvd from Fuji, and the data layer is super dark and rich. The new disks from verbatim have a noticeably less reflective surface than the 10 year old disk. The drives today may not need as thick a reflective layer as they did in the past, but it could also be manufactures edging the bare minimum quality barrier.

If your drive is varying its write speed, you can tell by a broken pattern on the data side. If your drive is varying its write speed, or if you notice that the buffer size goes up and down (if your burning software displays this information), then another possibility is that Windows has changed your drive back to PIO mode. I don't know if Windows 7 & 8 still do this, but I think they do. This happens if the computer has a hard time reading a disc. I've had this happen to me over a dozen times in the past ten years. It usually happens when I put a Netflix disc into my computer without first inspecting the disc. About one out of ten Netflix discs arrive cracked. Often my computer will read a portion of the disc, and then hang up. Windows keeps trying and finally makes a final attempt to read the disc by going to the most basic way of reading the disc, turning off DMA and using PIO mode. Unfortunately, it never changes itself back. Once your burner is in this state, all bets are off and you will start burning really bad discs.

One thing I noticed when I did some disc testing with Nero speed test, is that error rates increase dramatically beyond 4GB. Yup, that is quite typical, although you shouldn't see the error rate rise to levels that would cause a problem.

I don't think John and I are very far apart on the test procedure data. My grandest point in the discussion is that the difference in disc manufacture makes a far greater impact on disc burn results, than the difference of write speed. However as you go up the scale of write speed say from 16x to 32x to 52x, the more of the risk for problematic burn results and quality.
So with 16x media which is my all time favorite choice of media, I write at 8x and test at 4x with great consistent results. 32x media I burn at 8x to make it more averse of risk, while 52x media, I will likely burn at 16x and test at 4x. By the way I also maintain a store house of early media releases and as another member spoke to above, I find that media has often better quality than bread and butter purchases of recent media releases.

As John states, the variation in disc speed, (which I call disk hover) is not an issue of ram in the mboard but the PIO mode drop down as the error self-correction and disk media struggle with the drive for readability. Disk reflectivity of different manufacturer plays a part in this.

The topic of optimal burn speed seems to be a perennial that just keeps coming back.

I have always maintained that it makes little difference if the burner is operating correctly and uses a suitable methodology for a particular disk. BUT in the past few years I've discovered an exception to my rule--

I found that when I burned Taiyo Yuden WaterShield CD-R disks at their rated speed (52X, I think) on my NEC 3550a twin burners, the disks would play just fine everywhere--except in my wife's Lincoln automobile CD changer and a friend's 2010 Lexus CD changer. Okay, so there is still some variability in players; I switched to Verbatim for a while, putting up with the matte finish to get universal playability. Then, purely by accident, I discovered that if I slowed the burn speed to 24x, the TY disks played perfectly in the auto changers, too. So SOMETHING was different in how the burn appeared at 24X versus 52X. And this with high-quality blanks and burners with a good reputation.

I rationalize that the difference in burn time for a CD is pretty trivial, so I can easily afford to slow down the burn. For my DVDs, however, the extra minutes per disk really add up, so I still burn DVDs at high speed. So far, I haven't noticed much, if any, increase in correctable errors with the Nero DVD Speed utility.

I always test all my burnt optical discs for soft errors using a LiteOn drive and either KProbe2, or more lately Nero DiscSpeed. Whenever I have done tests of the same material burnt on the same disc type with different speeds, I have never seen any trend that would suggest that slower is better.

Sometimes higher errors occur in a cluster, and this cluster may be near the start, near the end or in between. I sometimes see DVD+R DL with higher errors in the second layer.

However, we must remember that read errors are a function of both the disc and the reader. The errors read with a computer drive may not indicate exactly the errors that would occur with some other reader. I have read, but not confirmed myself, that the best disc type for one reader may not be the best for another. And of course the errors we get today may be different from those of tomorrow or next year.