dbminter

Board appears to be operating as "expected" now when I click on unread content.

Yeah, as long as there's a VIDEO_TS folder on the disc with VOB and IFO files and they're properly authored, DVDShrink should read in the contents for possible salvaging. However, my experience with DVD Video Recorders is the contents they write to discs need to be finalized before they can be playable contents.

I actually had 3 NS60's sitting around. One gets used and the other 2 were older units. I always have a backup for my tech on hand when it dies. And it is a question of when, not if. The oldest one died and I swapped in the oldest of the other 2, but it also died in under a week. It's time was close to dying, too. The one I swapped in just recently was the newest one I had. Next month, I plan on getting another NS60 to have on hand to swap in when this one eventually gives up the ghost. There's no set in stone answer on when a laser will die. I've had drives that lasted 2 years and I've had drives that lasted 2 months before they gave up the ghost. But, there are certain factors that help age a laser. Particularly, how long it's been used. In other words, how many discs it's burned. The good news about LG is they have a very good replacement policy. They will replace a drive if it dies before a year. If it's out of warranty, they charge $40 for a replacement, which is cheaper than the drive new. However, though I've had to get several replacements from LG over the years that were out of warranty, they have never charged me the $40 replacement fee for any drive I've returned.

As for the reliability of the NS60, it's really up to the discs you're putting in. For instance, just now, on the NS60 I swapped in, I got a failure on Verify right at the start of a BD-R burn. However, the next write of the same image to the same Verbatim BD-R succeeded so that most likely a fluke. 1 bad disc in a stack of 50. So, it's generally not the reliability of the drive that fails, it's the discs. However, some drives do have bad firmware like Pioneer and ASUS. Of course, this could be an indication the BD laser is going bad in this NS60, too. I've no idea how long this NS60 was sitting there on the shelf or how long I'd used it before putting it on the shelf.

Verbatim probably actually doesn't make their own optical drives. Half of their discs they don't make themselves; they're farmed out to CMC Magnetics. You should avoid slim model drives whenever possible. They're generally junk. I do have a slim model Verbatim DVD drive for those rare cases when my NS60 won't read a disc. LG drives can be picky readers. Like maybe 1 disc in 100 can't be read by them. The only 2 burn tests I gave it had 50/50 results. DVD-R burned fine, but DVD+RW didn't.

The WH16NS60 is as reliable as the lasers that are put into each unit. (A BD burner has 2 lasers: one for CD and DVD and the other for Blu-Ray.) By that, I mean I've had relatively 100% success rate except when the lasers are dying. For instance, earlier in the week, I swapped out an NS60 for a replacement because it failed twice in a row to burn BD-R. Swapping it out worked because the BD laser was dying. Personal experience has lead me to believe the NS60 is the best of the worst. It has the fewest problems of the 3 major manufacturers. The LG's limitations are it claims to write 16x to 16x BD-R but only writes at 12x. Other write rates are also slightly less than the other manufacturers. If there is any recovery of buffers during a write, BD-R maxes out at only 6x and DVD-R at only 8x. Lastly, the NS60 does not properly write to the latest model Ritek 8x DVD+RW. It does to the earlier model Ricoh, but not the latest Ritek ones from Imation. There are two other major BD manufacturers out there. As you know, Pioneer is one. Pioneer unfortunately is a non-starter because it's become junk over the last few years. BD-RE only ever verifies at 2x max even though 2x BD-RE is capable of much faster read speeds. Lastly, Pioneer firmware has, for years, been unable to write properly to the old model Ritek 8x DVD+RW. They always fail Verifies. The other major manufacturer is ASUS, but they're a non-starter, too. When their model was first released, the firmware destroyed DVD+RW and BD-RE! Subsequent firmware updates stopped that, but the drive still doesn't properly write to new Imation Ritek 8x DVD+RW. The deal killer is DVD+R DL. They always fail Verify at the layer change, meaning the firmware doesn't properly write Verbatim MKM high quality DVD+R DL. I've never written any TL BD media so I can't say how well the NS60 handles those. I've burned a few M-Disc, but only SL's. And the only BD DL media I've ever burned is BD-RE DL. You may be tempted to get the WH16NS40 because it's cheaper if you don't need UHD. Don't. The NS40 will 9 times out of 10 fail to properly write to BD DL media.

Is there something wrong with the board right now? Unread Contents is displaying a new message, but when I open it, instead of opening the latest post, it displays the first post. And, even if I do do that, the forum still thinks it's an unread post. Only if I actually open the page containing the last post does Unread Contents clear the post. Thanks!

Pioneer USED to be a good brand. But, starting around 4 years ago, they became junk. I had a Pioneer BD that lasted over 2 years , the best performance I ever got out of an optical burner. The last Pioneer I had died after 2 months and I've never gone back to them. They also steadfastly refuse to address the improper write strategy for Ritek/Ricoh 8x DVD+RW in their firmware which prevents their use in Pioneer BD drives. LG makes the best of the worst BD burners. They all have issues, but LG's WH16NS60 is the only BD burner I recommend and it does support M-Disc.

Windows 11 is a major step backwards. Upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11, Win 11 can't even open PNG files right! If you double click on them, Photos won't open them saying something about a specified module could not be found. Photos WILL open them IF, every time, you select the Photos app to open them manually EACH time!

BTW, to get a bit off topic, have you seen that FXX is carrying reruns of King Of The Hill? For the first time in several years, KOTH is back, after being nowhere on TV for a while.

If you have Virtual CloneDrive installed on Windows 10 and you upgrade it to Windows 11, you must reinstall CloneDrive in order for it to work on Windows 11. This has happened many times in the past when upgrading Windows between versions, so it's not new. Just a reminder to do it.

You know what? In all this time, I never noticed the change log file before! Good to know where it is now.

Well, $500 is a nice incentive for LUK to try and get a new version released by year's end.

Well, LUK may have painted himself into a corner elsewhere when he said he'd hoped to have a new update released by the end of the year. Work does progress on ImgBurn, though not at the pace of the past. There was a beta released almost 3 years and 10 months ago with the latest changes rolled into it. It would be nice to get another beta to try out before the final release, though...

Well, the ASUS BD burners may be an option if you never intend to burn DVD+R DL. I never got beyond testing the last ASUS BD burner I got for testing a few months ago after it failed to properly write to DVD+R DL. BD-R was fine, but I only ever got around to testing DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD+R DL, and BD-R. And the DVD+RW, while the ASUS drive had moved beyond the catastrophic failure of DESTROYING DVD+RW it used to do, I hadn't thoroughly tested the DVD+RW burn results. Initial indications were it didn't write correctly as they had playback problems on the PS3. But, I never got around to thoroughly vetting them yet when the catastrophic failure on DVD+R DL was a deal killer. I told ASUS, but, of course, they don't listen.