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03-30-2008, 11:49 PM
oregonpete oregonpete is offline
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I'm having serious problems with degradation of DVDs in as little as several months. Over the past 18 months I've transferred about 15 video tapes to DVD, after editing, narrating, and compiling into DV format with iMovie (v5 and 6). I now find that all of them older than 6 months will not play properly, and some of the more recent ones are getting a little flaky.

They have many skips and freezes; some won't even load. Of course I checked when they were first burned, and they played fine. Other software and hardware details: Computer: 15" G4 flat panel iMac running OS 10.4. All burned with Toast (v6 or v7) at the "best" speed setting. Two different external DVD burners were used, a Formac for the first few, and most with a LaCie d2 Firewire. Media used were Beall and Ritek DVD-R.

I still have the original videotapes, but I'm not really happy about several hundred hours of editing and compiling going down the drain. I don't wish to repeat this experience, so I've purchased and addition external hard drive to archive future disk images, and I've learned a lot about quality of media, mostly from this site. In researching this problem on the web, I didn't run across any other reports of degradation problems of this magnitude. Is my experience unusual? Any further insight into the factors involved, and/or recommendations beyond buying top- quality media
(which I have already done)?
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  #2  
03-31-2008, 01:56 AM
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The likelihood of having a DVD actually degrade is about the same as buying a winning lottery ticket. So don't lose faith in the format as a whole.

However, there are many reasons why a DVD will not perform as well as desired, and it can almost always be attributed to the media in use, the players/readers in use, and the method of storage.

So let's start from the top.
  1. What is the brand and media ID of the discs?
  2. What are the brands and model numbers of the DVD players or DVD recorders used for testing the disc?
  3. What is the manufacter, brand, and firmware type of the DVD-ROM and/or DVD burner used for testing the disc?
  4. How were these discs stored? Give a much information as possible (brand of items, where purchased, etc).
  5. Are you a smoker? Be it cigarettes or some other guilty pleasure of choice. If so, do you smoke indoors, or is there a heavy smoke smell from smoke that follows you back inside when smoking outdoors?
Optical media is susceptible to three main problems:

  1. Diffraction of light. A typical cause is scratches, including ones so small the "naked eye" cannot observe them.
  2. Poor reflective properties. Some disc's materials do not adequately reflect light, so the data cannot be read, or can only partially be read. As lasers age, poorer media quits playing first. Pressed media generally can be read the longest, as it has better reflective properties than dye or phase-change materials.
  3. Poor lasers. Unlike media, lasers can and will die in a few short years, especially on lower-cost equipment. Optical electronics are also extremely susceptible to damage by smoke, and it's no wonder smokers are the ones found with the most failing DVD equipment.

Another item of note is testing methods. A great many people have not run a full battery of tests on discs, relying on playing media, or on those near-useless PIF/PIE/PI/PO tests that are found in "scanning" software. Those are known to be unreliable outside of a pro lab, due to the many variables that exist in testing. Playing a disc will heavily rely on the player's error correction, so you won't actually get a good handle on the data's integrity.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

From the details I've gathered so far, you're already suffering from poor media. Ritek does not degrade as much as it's difficult to read, even under optimal conditions. Of all the media that exists, it seems to have the poorest reflective quality around. It's not "dead" as much as it's just hard to read (and it always was -- but your equipment ages too, which makes it appear that the disc "died" on you). If you're lucky, it might just be a lot of dust has gotten into your player.

BeAll media is just as bad, if not worse.

Neither of them would be considered "top quality" media, and never have been outside of a few user forums online (the blind leading the blind, if you know what I mean). It's a shame those sites mislead so many folks. High quality media is and has always been discs manufactured by (not branded by, but MANUFACTURED by) Taiyo Yuden, Mitsubishi/Verbatim, Maxell, TDK and Sony. These days, TDK and Maxell is almost impossible to find (again, the manufacturer, not the brand). Sony is only good from Taiwan and Japan, not Malaysia. Verbatim is easy to find, and is often on sale. Taiyo Yuden is only available online, and you only want to buy from a reputable dealer (supermediastore.com, meritline.com, rima.com, gotmedia.com) to avoid fake TY discs.

In terms of archives, it's smart to use multiple types of media (often even stored in multiple locations) to avoid loss. A good hard drive (Western Digital or Seagate manufactured drives -- nothing else!) full of images is a great idea. Some good discs at another location is great. And even a second set of discs, from another good manufacturer, is suggest at another location. Maybe even put on set in a fire safe somewhere, or a bank security box with other valuables.

I see you've been buying a lot of Mac-marketed brands like Formac and Lacie. Honestly, it's a waste of money. Those devices can sometimes use sub-standard internals, or they'll use the good internals at a crazy-high price compared to buying the manufacturer's self-named brand. Pioneer/Samsung/Sony burners and Seagate/Western Digital hard drives work perfectly on an Apple machine, and are much better in terms of reliability. The gear in use might be partially to blame too.

Computers rarely know more than humans, so the "best" speed in Toast may not actually be the best speed. You'd do best to set the disc speed based on the disc. If you've got 16x Verbatim media, burn anywhere from 4x to 12x. Odds are those Ritek and BeAll media were burned too fast, which led to first-unnoticed errors (or imperfections) that have always existed.

Your current discs may still be salvageable on a good drive. I have several BTC drives, known as some of the best readers around, that are good at reading stubborn media. Only a fully-inoperable disc ever fails to read on my drives. They would need to be ripped, and then re-burned to a good disc. I can usually recover about 80-90% of "dead discs", because most of them are fine, just hard as all heck to read.

So that's probably where you are. I don't even know that I need the answers to the question above, but it might be good to know. Odds are that several of your drives being used for testing are the same brand or even same model of drive in various pieces of equipment. So they'd all give the same performance for reading a stubborn disc. RITEKG04 and RITEKG05 media have been some of the worst discs, when it comes to reflective quality, so check the ID on those discs.

Hope that helps.

If you'd like me to try and rip/re-copy some of your media, I don't charge a whole lot for that service.

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03-31-2008, 03:38 PM
oregonpete oregonpete is offline
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Thanks for your very detailed, prompt and useful reply. I think I have narrowed down the culprit to the burn speed and/or the eternal burners. (I had a lot of problems with the LaCie - it was replaced twice in the first 3 months under warranty.)

I realized this morning that I had also burned some DVDs of TV programs off the air with my JVC DVD/HD/VHS playback/record deck about a year ago using the same BeAll and Ritek blanks that I used for the problematic home movies. This machine only burns at 1X. I tried a few of these, and Bingo! they played perfectly in either of my 2 Macs or my JVC, Panasonic or Toshiba DVD players.

I would be interested in letting you try ripping and re-copying the ones I'm having problems with. Please let me know via email what you would charge for 14 DVDs.

A couple of further questions:
  • My current burner is the one built into my Intel iMac. System profiler says it's a Matshita DVD-R UJ-85J. Any opinions about it?
  • Also, I have some TDK TT02 disks, which are on your First Class Media list, except a label on the cake box says "Made in India". Your thoughts?
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04-01-2008, 08:54 AM
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Well, there's a chance that you're partially correct. The factors that caused an under-performing media experience are cumulative. Burn speed could be a factor, but it's most definitely not the only one here.

When media is burned (as opposed to commercial discs, which are pressed), the laser has to etch data into a flat spinning object. If the media is of poorer quality -- and both Ritek and BeAll are considered non-archival lower-grade media -- it may not balance perfectly while spinning. This causes the laser to "spill out" into non-writeable areas of the disc surface. Sometimes this causes a hard fault, and other times it relies on disc/player error correction to read data later on. In both cases, the burn isn't very good.

If you cause the tiniest scratch over that error correction spot on the disc, you've lost the data. The "original" was never on the disc and the "backup" is now unreadable too, hence a bad disc that seems to have "died".

If these discs were stored in wallets, ever set surface-down on even a dusty or unclean desk/shelf, then adds are they have scratches be they the invisible (to our eyes) or readily visible. Wallets also tend to warp a disc, due to pressures from over-stuffed binders. Some cheap DVD cases also warp media, including cases used on some commercial releases.

Burning lower-grade media at a slower speed would probably make your discs last longer, but only because it has ensured a higher-quality burn from the start. And even then, a poor disc can still be bad at slower speeds.

The quality of the burner could also be at hand, where it used the wrong write strategy on the media, thus causing an inferior burn.

But given what I do know about media, I suggest you copy those Ritek/BeAll discs -- the ones you CAN STILL read -- to new Verbatim discs. The ones you CANNOT read, consider letting me recover the data and do that task for you.

The Matsushita drive (I've removed the over-aggressive profanity filter -- funny stuff!) is a rather picky drive, so you'll want to stick to the best media only. Verbatim is well-known to work decent with that drive, and it is one of the best media available today.

I'm honestly not a fan of internal laptop DVD burners (desktops are fine, by contrast). I have to use external Samsung (Sony-branded) USB2 drives for the best performance on my laptops. I usually burn from certain locations (office, home, family's house on a trip), the built-in is mostly a reader and rarely a writer.

TDK's own manufactured media is usually plenty fine. But I'd personally not use them for archival needs if they came form India. I'm no longer sure TDK's oversight exists. You likely have old 8x disc media, I think 16x TDK is non-existent now (not seen any in a long, long time). Use them for burns of data that can easily be replaced, not something you're relying on archiving for many years, or as a master disc for copying. For archival needs, I highly suggest only using Verbatim DVD-R/DVD+R and Taiyo Yuden DVD+R right now.

I'll send an e-mail soon. If you don't hear back within a day or two, please e-mail me. I'll be using Verbatim DVD+R as the new disc, if and when I recover your discs.



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