Pain_Man

I keep hearing the same thing...and from multiple sources. USB burner = bad idea. Unless you have no other choice, i.e. a laptop that didnt come with a burner, etc.

Yeah, we're too old and too battle-scarred to muck about with fighting these days. A useless expenditure of emotional and psychical energy. = These friends of mine are some of the tech savviest people you're ever going to run into; many of them are just plain some of the smartest people you're going to run into. I understand that you're having a frustrating problem; a long time ago I was told to avoid USB burners if I could. And I've stuck to that advice. I've even tried SATA II burners--both of them were demonstrably slower than IDE versions of the same make!. Fortunately, Plextor's retail distributor (can't remember the name at the moment) is very flexible and easy to deal with. Both times they swapped out the drive for it's IDE equivalent with a minimum of amount of bullshit. AS FOR MEDIA... I concur with blu. I've burned scores and scores of Taiyo Yudens. My best results (SL) have been with model number: Yuden000-T02-00 (@8x to 12x max burn depending upon burner, et al). But I've had good luck with every flavor of First Quality Goods from Taiyo. I've never tried their "bargain bundles" of old 4x stock. I don't know if they are overstock of Seconds (i.e. some manufacturing defect, usually slight, but something that makes the run of discs fail their QC test); given that Taiyo invented the dye-based CD-R, my guess is that they are probably ok. But I stick with First Quality. I suggest you grab a disc reader such as this FREE one: Vso-Soft Inspector. As you can see, this applet gives you stats as to how it's performed using Vso's burning software & the burner in question. A 5% failure rate out of 556,000 burns gives you a good idea of how well this medium is going to perform. As for Verbatim, one has to be a little carefuller these days. I bought at least one 50 pack of Verbatim-badged CD-Rs that turned out to be CMCs. Oddly enough, they've not given me any trouble. In fact, I've had more coasters from Sony's yellow label model# 50CDQ80LS3 In general, however, their DVDs are good gear. In fact, I can't remember--knock on wood--the time I had a coaster with model #MCC 03RG20/95037, a 16x +R. A 95.6% success rate out of 3.77 million burns. Excellent. (Even higher on my Plextor 760A.) As a general rule, with DVDs, there's no good reason to burn as fast as your hardware can handle it. I've gotten my best results with Single Layer discs by burning them @8x. Sure, it costs some extra minutes, but the quality improvement is worth it, imo. As for DVD+R DLs: Verbatim is the only way to fly. FYI: I'm only my 512th burner and I've yet to see any of them meet the maximum speed for burning DLs. The Plextor 760A box touts it as burning DLs at 10x. Nah. 6x is the fastest I see. Which isn't a problem since, again, with DVD-Video, the slower the burn, the better the result (and this isn't exclusive to optical media... ) The other brand I've tried, Memorex is G-A-R-B-A-G-E. They are rebadged CMC's--one of the companies with the worst rep--and deservedly so. While, in my experience, their CD-Rs are acceptable, not so their DVDs. Out of one ten pack, nine were coasters. My wife bought me a 15-pack (I think it went on her company's tab, so what the hell). Every single one of them has coastered so far; I've still got 7 or 8 of them left. I use them only for data (especially song backup, e.g. ripping a bunch of albums to .ape format for storage). Using them for DVD-Video (home recorded, private video only, OF COURSE!!!).

Does this just about sum it all up? =)) =))

Happy B-day.

Which studios? Both Paramount and Universal have publicly stated that they are sticking with HD-DVD. Granted Sony and Time-Warner and Disney amount to a large fraction, but not a majority, of releasing studios, but I don't think the Fat Lady's even got her sheet music, let alone doing scales...not just yet anyway. When the rumored dual-format machines (i.e. the ones that cost less than the $1000s currently on the market) make their appearance (supposedly in Q2-3), whichever "wins" won't matter much. Though they will never be as interchangeable as with DVD-R and DVD+R, having sub-$200 dual-players makes any "victory" moot. Especially since dual format burners will not be far behind the stand-alones.* It's unfortunate that people aren't waking up and realizing that BR is far more restrictive format, encumbered by Sony's obsession with treating its customers like criminals and demanding ankle-grabs whenever it suits them (e.g. the "BD+" mess). Unlike HDDVD, BR requires every disc to use AACS. The latter also has mandatory region coding, something HDDVD doesn't. SD-DVDs, by contrast, require neither CSS, region coding, or any other consumer-fucking technologies. If BR does "win", then we'll all be thanking--and paying--a certain Antiguan company...(or a certain Hong Kong based company, whichever one prefers). As we've seen with SD-DVDs, the more restrictive, anti-consumer studios like Sony and Disney become, the more aggressive the movement to restore consumer rights becomes. Allelujah! I wonder if SACD might have had more of chance if they hadn't had so-called "copy" protection. *Makes me wonder what would have happened if someone had come out with a VCR/Beta dual format video recorder back in the day....

I haven't had any problem with the iso's that I ripped with 2.4.0.0 on my Vista-driven (Toshiba) laptop. They both mounted on Alcohol52 w/o issue and played without issue. (Actually, I have another issue related to this, unfortunately, I can't bring it up, or be less cryptic, in this forum). So I don't know what to make of it. Probably just another one of those weird Vista issues. (BTW -- either burned or burnt are acceptable; the latter is more frequently used in British English.)

Wasn't one of your messages. It was a message from Vista, i.e. the OS. I installed 2.4.0.0 over 2.3.4.0 (whichever the previous one was). I let the installer start it and Vista hit me the message, again, sorry I did take a screenshot. I made a few minor, changes settings changes. Then, out of nowhere, with on indications anything was wrong, it said This program was not installed correctly. Would you like Vista to reinstall it for you?. I clicked the "no" button then I ripped a DVD to a .iso on the hdd. That didn't really make much since to me since the installer completed its tasks with no apparent problem. I didn't get a chance to look at the "Details"; the installer moved too fast for me. (It's a Toshiba laptop I got last yr as a replacement for a bad Gateway; say what you will about Best Buy, they gave me a $900 credit with a minmum of bullshit.) The image I mounted in alcohol played just fine. So I'm not sure what that pop up from Vista was about.

Here's an example of a stellar read I got off a DVD using v.2400: This from a disc that had multiple scratches on. The new version really cleaned up. I got a "You should reinstall ImgBurn...." pop up from Vista (Home Premium) on my laptop after ripping a DVD using Alcohol52. I don't have a screen shot of it, but if it pops up again, I'll post it. Any one else have this problem?

Don't take this personally, I mean that I'm not casting doubt, but can you source this statement? There are and is a lot of dirty tricks going on with BlueRay and HD DVD. If you read up on the web you'll see both camps are shitting in each others backyards by paying certain companies NOT to stock the others goods. Now that is just plain nasty. It's not only nasty, but in the US, it's a federal crime. They put people in prison for it, fine companies millions, etc. ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) got their asses in a serious sling for fixing prices on (if memory serves) corn syrup. The CEO & son nearly went to jail. The DOJ nails asses to the wall for this. There was a rumor that Sony paid TimeWarner $40,000,000 to choose Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. This remains unproven (and denied by both companies). I don't know if that's illegal (if there's a corporate lawyer who's a member here...)

@dont... secondly blu ray piccy and hd dvd piccy are the same, blu ray navigation is not as good as hd-dvd You are right here, dont. The thing I wasn't factoring in was 1080p. When I saw HD-DVD on 1080p set the picture quality is the same. I did buy a Toshiba A30 HD-DVD player (the "middle" one). The picture quality (depending, of course, on the quality of the source) is equal to the best HiDef pictures on cable. The up-rezzing feature for SD DVDs really does make a difference. I was always skeptical of this but it truly does raise the quality. I admit I don't understand how it works, just that it does. The downside is, while the player does play Red Book CDs, it doesn't play MP3s or any other compressed music files. Also, it doesn't appear to be capable of remembering the place where one stops an HD-DVD (tho' it will). By contrast, my Sony 5-disc CD/DVD player can remember 40 discs & play MP3/WMA CDROMs. In the plus column, the HDDVD player's audio processor is outstanding, producing simply fantastic sound. (I have a mid-level Yamaha surround sound system. I goofed there though: I didn't realize I needed a receiver that could process Dolby Digital+ and TrueHD--my preference is for the latter. However, had I bought such a sound system I would have had to buy the top of the line Toshiba player, a hundred more bucks, about 12 pounds these days I think.)

They can easily maintain their margins by raising prices. I think they should have done that without the mealy mouthed (in my opinion) excuse about the dollar's current woes. When the Euro came out, it cost 1.25 Euros to buy a buck. Currencies are cyclical like most things: they go up they go down. The dollar will go up again. Doubtless they aren't American. Unless they don't mind spending sometime in Club Fed playing golf with crooked bankers and lawyers. If not European, then Indian or Taiwanese. I doubt the IT bench in Antigua is that deep. Some country that hasn't enacted some variation of the abortion: the DMCA. One of the reasons I've bought more than one product from them is the fact that they charge only once for the license (you can pay yearly if you want tech support but how many people actually do that?!). Other companies , won't upgrade you, for free, to the next version even if you purchased the previous version just weeks before! So to get the latest and greatest updates to the prog(s), you have to pony up more bucks. Some of these companies cause people to look for keygens, cracks etc by using despicable tactics like that. If you pay for a year of program updates that's what you should get. And NOT some shit about how "Your version is the latest one." When they released the next update!! And I think that's one of the most powerful drivers of the Freeware movement (if it can be called by that overused term): people are tired of constant demands for more money from software firms. Those of us who've worked in the industry know how absurdly expensive software development is. (E.g.: Motorola spent $500,000,000--in today's values that's about ten grand--developing software for their failed satellite phone business.) And probably the majority of new software projects fail at some point in the development process. And that doesn't even count the commercial failures where the prog just failed to catch on. But the progs that are succesful can be killed by greed, always "offers" for "discounts" to buy again the program you just bought a few months back. This can even apply to companies (i.e. Apple) totally destroys itself by some of the stupidest management decisions in the history of commerce. If hadn't been for the iPod, Apple would have joined Commodore and other such companies on the ash-heap of corporate history (to paraphrase Trotsky). And the real laugher is that if it hadn't been for Microsoft pumping $300M into Apple, there wouldn't have been any company around to create the iPod.

Thx. That's always been one of the biggest items on my ImgBurn wish list so I'm glad to hear it. I use CloneCD almost exclusively for ripping/cloning cds (all perfectly legal under US law). But it's a rather...limited program with limited features. It's activity log, in particular, is bare bones to the point of anorexia. Rather like the red-headed stepchild that no one pays any attention to. It went TEN months between updates. Obviously not a priority in Antigua.

The makers of CloneCD has announced a 40% (!) price increase starting 1 JAN 2008. Until then the prices remain the same. They're switching their pricing from dollar to the euro. Their reasoning isn't very well thought out (they site the instability of the dollar; as if the euro stands still), but they're raising prices. Also it isn't clear--at least to me--whether the price increase will affect only those paying in USD or is general. If someone else can figure it out, pls enlighten me. *which (basically) does the same that IB does except for CDs (though it can make 1:1 copies of unimprisoned DVDs, it uses it's own proprietary file format, making it less useful except, e.g., if you were copying some business records or a company training video, etc. The product is perfectly legal, to repeat, it cannot make copies of any CDs/DVDs encumbered with so-called "protections".

Thanks for the tip.

Not a big fan of "bonus" features on regular DVDs. I rarely watch them. Hell, I've got all three super-mega-deluxe Lord of the Rings sets and I've probably watched half a dozen of the "extras." If I have a choice, I will usually buy just the straight movie (as I did with Transformers) rather than spend $5 to $10 extra for a "Bonus Disc" I'll probably never use. It does appear that HDDVD has more bells and whistles but as my old man always said about cars, "It's just more shit to break." So what if you can download wallpapers and screensavers via an HDDVD disc? I'd much rather have the overwhelming picture superiority of BR. (Again, imo.)

I was @ our friendly neighborhood Blockbuster about two weeks ago and they still had HD-DVDs on the shelf (not unexpectedly there were more HDDVD's sitting on the shelves than BR discs). 'Course they could have changed their policy in the interim. Stand-alone Blu-Ray burners are also coming down in price finally. At the beginning of the year (wasn't that about ten minutes ago? How'd it get to be friggin' Nov?) they were going for $899 at BestBuy. Three weeks ago they were $499. I figure by Xmas they might be sub-$200. The console is more my daughter than me. I'm fine with my gaming PC. But if I can kill two electronic birds with one virtual stone, then my kid's happy and I've got my BR player all for less than the comparable Xbox model. Alright--off to play Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Most bad-ass. (Greedy bastards, charging 30 bills for 1/3rd of a game--if that! Still the graphics are off the chart as is everything else.)

Thanks for taking the time for the advice. Appreciate it. You've got me in one respect: I haven't done a direct comparison. But I'm the only one in the family with an LCD monitor. My parents and my brother both have plasmas. My brother did hook up his Xbox 360 and run the Quake IV demo on the plasma. Imo, Q4 looks better on my PC. But maybe you've got better eyesight than I do? Who knows? It's a matter of personal preference. Take a look at a Blu-Ray disc on a $4000 60in Aquos and you'll see what I mean. It'll blow you away. The demo of Cars was jaw-dropping. Like seeing HDTV for the first time. My main TV is a 34in Panasonic--the last flat-screen CRT they made (maybe the last model anyone made). Wife wants to upgrade to a 60incher (yeah, there's an, ah, pregnant line...) at some point. But we got a smallish living room, so the 34in looks good. Fortunately, Panasonic was smart enough to include an HDMI port (and the Yamaha system below has two inputs and an output). couple that with my new Yamaha Surround Sound System (which cost half a yard) and the experience is, er, theatrical. It's true there is some dispute (by Toshiba!) as to how the numbers of players and discs are being counted. But the big retailers seem to agree that BR discs are moving much faster now than HDDVD which, for much of last year, were outselling the former. I laid down $4K for my computer and various peripherals plus my new surround. While I'd love to have both of them, that's just not in the cards. So I got to choose between Xbox and PS3. Right now PS3 is looking like it'll be the one. There's a question I'd love to ask but for XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX X XXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX. Bummer.

Thanks for the long write up. It'll help. May be this is a stupid question, but are Microsoft Games, and I mean the Halo series chiefly, available for PS3? Champing at the bit to play Halo 2/3 but I don't want to convert my PC from XP to Vista until I absolutely have to. (My one attempt at a dual boot ended in a complete crash and I had to restore the entire C partition with Acronis True Image.) I agree with you 100%, Blu-Ray is, without doubt in my opinion, light years ahead of HDDVD in terms of picture quality. There's just no comparison. Besides, to play HD-DVD movies with the Xbox360 you have to pay $179 bucks extra--which makes it more expensive than the PS3 80GB model.

Supermediastore.com has qty 20 for US $42, shipping included. BestBuy is selling the same 20 pack for $58!! PLUS TAX! If you live in the western US you can often get them next day even with ground.

My wife and I are considering whether to buy a Playstation 3 or an X-box 360. My brother's got an Xbox 360 and it looks excellent on his plasma TV. (Natch, it's not in the same league as my dual 1/2 GB Radeon Crossfire X1950XTX with a Core Duo 7300 and 4Gb of RAM and a 23in 16x10 LCD flat panel monitor.) I'm rather desperate for a Blu-Ray player*. If the PS3 is equivalent than the Xbox, the former seems the logical choice to me. The PS3 comes in a 40GB and an 80GB models; why would one choose the 80 over the 40? Do the saved games take up that much space? I've compared them at stores on top of the line TVs and the Blu-Ray format simply blows doors. It is light-years ahead of HD-DVD in nearly every way I can think of. the difference in picture clarity between the two "Hi-Def" formats is like that between regular DVDs and VHS: no comparison. Besides, Blu-Ray (discs and players) is out-selling HD-DVD by more than two to one. This time, I think, Sony has already won the format war. So if some of y'all would be so kind as to my what you think of the two consoles, pros/cons, etc, I'd really appreciate it. I haven't had a console since my Atari 2600 (yeah, I know; but with computers having such incredible capabilities I haven't seen the reason for a dedicated console; but add-in a Blu-Ray player and that's a deal) so I do need some help in this area. What better place to come than here?

Thanks to anyone I failed to thank personally.

Thanks. The funny thing is, I've actually seen the pic you're using for your avatar...

Thanks! Whatcha think of what you've heard about the Lost Star Trek "prequel. (Abrams gonna park the Enterprise in fluidic space with a psychopath* and a Hobbit?!) How 'bout no Shatner? Guess Cap'n Kirk's ego is dented. Thought with such a huge, gas-filled structure you wouldn't think he'd even feel it. Besides, he hard needs the work. (He's freakin' hilarious on Boston Legal. "Denny Crane.") He and Nimoy got $6M per Old Trek movie while the rest of the "core" cast got paid only in the mid-to-high 6 figs. They actually needed the movies to live on. And there's said to have been more than a LOT of bad blood about the disparity in salaries. *If you're not familiar with Terry O'Quinn's career, his big break was a movie called The Stepfather and very effective terror-thriller. The sequel was pretty good too. Without spoiling too much, let's just say he's the bad stepfather.

nudge, nudge, wink, wink...

OK. Who the HELL let my ex sister-in-law in?!? I tole ya'll the short, obsese, oompla-loompla looking woman was not allowed in. Next year, guess I'll have to put up pictures on her face with a big red x thru it. Now she's eaten the $500 buffet table and there are two empty beer kegs.