Verifying DVD Quality

Butch Moore wrote on 1/29/2009, 9:15 AM
It's been a while since I've had to be concerened about the quality of our DVDs (error rates, etc.).

What's the latest, best (simplest) way to benchmark the quality of a burned disk?

I've had my burner now for several years and I'm beginning to feel like it's not up to par. I've had a couple of problems with glitches in the past month that I haven't experienced before.

Any advice is appreciated! Thanks!

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 1/29/2009, 9:39 AM
nero dvd speed
NickHope wrote on 1/29/2009, 9:50 AM
I use Nero DiscSpeed (formerly Nero "CD-DVD Speed") to troubleshoot and do a bit of quality assurance from time to time. I go to the "Disc Quality" tab and scan at 8x speed.

Here's one that scanned really nicely (Verbatim DVD+R burned in a Pioneer DVR212):



... and here's one that didn't (late Ritek garbage):



The most important thing to look for is the quality score towards the bottom right. If everything is working well (burner + media + software) you should be looking for 90-something quality scores. If the bottom graph starts to go orange>red then you're in trouble.

It's a good idea to scan on a different drive from the one that the disc was burnt with, but not essential and you'll still be able to spot coasters using just the one drive.

There is loads on this sort of thing at, as John Meyer described it, the "amazingly geeky" CD Freaks.
Terry Esslinger wrote on 1/29/2009, 10:11 AM
I followed your link but could not find the John Meyer article. Do you have a more direct address?
NickHope wrote on 1/29/2009, 11:02 AM
Terry, the forums on cdfreaks are where the disc-scanning geeks hang out.

The reference to John's quote is from the (once every ten years) thread about his new computer :-)

See also the recent DVDs locking up thread which is related to this.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/29/2009, 1:02 PM
Here's a scan of a Taiyo-Yuden disc I just made which is a bootable image backup of my WinXP boot partition. Note that it isn't quite as good as what Nick posted. This could mean that my burn isn't as good, but it also may not.

The reason for posting is to point out that while people at the club.cdfreaks.com site post their burn results in order to compare drives and media, you have to be a little careful doing this, because the results will vary considerably depending on what drive is used for testing the results.

Therefore, the REAL value comes from testing on the same drive. Thus, you can put into this same drive different media, or the same media burned with different burn strategies (such as burning at 4x, 8x, 16x) or burn software (Nero, DVD Architect). It is the relative results on your own drive (as shown wonderfully by the dramatic difference between the two burns Nick showed in his post, both measured on the same testing drive) that matters.