LIGHTNING UK!

If you compare it to the results I linked you to, you'll see mine were 10% of what yours are. Obviously the lower the better here as we're talking about errors. So this is where I'd be inclined to burn a couple more discs at different write speeds and then do the PIPO scan on those to see if they're better or worse than the discs you said you burnt at 6x.

I'd like to see the screenshots of the results please. If they look the same as your previous one, my response will be the same too.

I'm just repeating myself again. Please do what I've told you to.

Select it at 'Session' level. If you install the current release, the 'Create CD CUE File' window looks different to your screenshot and has options for auto selecting 'Tag' etc for CD-TEXT.

1. refer to number 3 in my previous reply. When I talk about testing/scanning discs, I don't mean the read test, I mean the proper PIPO scan where it shows you the nice graph. 2. Refer to number 2 in my previous reply. I didn't think my answer was vague, so please just listen to what I'm saying or I feel like I'm wasting my time. 3. Yes, the quality of the media. The quality of the burner (and its firmware). The write speed makes a difference too. I'm not so sure pie/pif/jitter really come into it on blank media - as there's no data there to have errors in the first place! So no, nothing is 'high' from the factory. Of course some media is just 'bad' to start with, that's why everyone says to buy decent stuff and not go for cheap discs (you haven't).

This isn't a program issue, your drive just doesn't like the new discs you've got. You'll have to try and get some with the same 'MID' as your last lot. The new 'MID' (CMCMAG-BA5-000) looks like it isn't supported (at all, or just very well) by your drive and the 1.03 firmware.

1. Yes 2. I said you 'might find' - as in, it's possible. The only way to know the best speed to burn them at is by burning a few discs at each speed and scanning them. The one that produces the best quality burns is what you should use. 3. To be totally sure, you'd need to test all of them. If you're happy to just take a chance and assume they'll all behave the same way, just scan a small sample of them - maybe 5 in a 25 pack.

Not really worrisome, no. I'd just expect a little better. You might find the drive does a better job of burning them at 4x or 8x. Check a handful of the ones you've burnt and see if they're all roughly the same.

What speed did you burn at? Going by an 8x burn of the same 'MCC 03RG20' discs but with an 'Optiarc 5280S' drive (as listed in the 'Drives' forum), your scan is a fair bit worse. http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?/topic/20192-optiarc-dvd-rw-ad-5280s-cb-robot/?p=143268 My PIE (PI) levels were 1/10 of what yours are.

Really? I could have sworn I'd seen you post a PIE / PIF scan over at the MyCE forums. Oh well. No, you need to do the other test (and not the 'readtest', ImgBurn's verify already does that - assuming you haven't disabled it)... which you could have done 1000 times over in the amount of time it's taken you to repeatedly ask this question. All you know at the moment is the discs is 'ok' (satisfactory) - in that the drive is able to read it at this moment in time. It might be struggling to read it and performing lots of error correction, but it can read it. That's why you need to do the other test. Why don't you do it right now? Go on, fire up one of the tools and do a PIE/PIF/Jitter (or PIPO as it's also known) scan. Feel free to post a screenshot of the results (the graph itself, not the text version).

You know if the burn has failed because the drive either errors out during the write operation or it errors out during the verify operation. I'm sure you've already used the test (whatever Nero called it) to report the PIE/PIF/Jitter levels so I'm not sure why you're asking me what it's called?! I don't use the Nero one. In KProbe it's the 'BLER' tab. In Opti Drive Control it's called 'Disc quality'. In DVDInfoPro it's the 'Scan' button at the top (PIPO Scan).

I've no idea.

I don't know exactly what cdspeed is doing when you do that test (I'm assuming it's just issuing 'Read' commands to the drive like ImgBurn's Verify), but you can have high levels of PIE/PIF without having an actual read error reported by the drive.

It means the drive can read the disc. That's no different to verifying in ImgBurn. If the disc is so badly burnt that a sector is unreadable (whereby the drives internal error correction routines have failed), the drive will report a read error on that sector. Initial high PIE and PIF will, I guess, mean that as the disc deteriorates (normally), it'll be totally unreadable (at least in part) before one that initially had low pie/pif levels. Yes, pie/pif levels can be bad without causing outright 'read error' to be returned by the drive as it tries to read the disc. As with anything, if something is bad to begin with, you'd expect it to fail sooner. So just do the proper pie/pif tests and base your conclusions as to wether or not it's a good burn on those results rather than if the disc verifies / tests ok. If it fails to verify / test ok, throw it in the bin.

I did say 'help', I didn't say it would provide the perfect answer. And as you said, it just needs a small modification.

Maybe this will help? http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?/topic/24425-batch-burn-for-folders/

Back again hey... 1. Google it. 2. Testing a disc to find out its PIE/PIF/Jitter levels doesn't actually change anything to do with the disc, so whether or not you do it makes no difference to its life expectancy. Assuming a decent burn in the first place (low PIE/PIF/Jitter), if the manufacturer says the discs will last X number of years and you store them according to how the manufacturer says you should store them, there's no reason to think they won't do just that.

Sweetlabs itself is still going, it's just the OpenCandy division that they shut down. They wanted to focus on other (mobile) things.

OpenCandy was never malware itself, it was just an advertising plugin / platform for 3rd party software within installation programs. It did what Google AdSense does for websites. Anyway, it no longer exists. They shut their doors back at the end of June 2016 and so even if I was still using their plugin, it wouldn't be able to offer any 3rd party software.

I don't think that drive will work at all. You need a LiteOn model really.

The layer break on BD-R / BD-RE is in a fixed position and cannot be moved. For BD-ROM, it varies depending on how much has been recorded on the disc and where they want it I expect. So no, it's not the same structure etc. Yes, they're recorded in OTP style. Inner to outer on the first layer and outer to inner on the 2nd. I don't know the answer to the laser power question I'm afraid.

Post the log of you burning and verifying the disc please.

I'm afraid there's no simple answer to this. The exact size required depends on various things... the number of files in any given directory, the length of each folder and file name, the type of file systems included on the disc (and versions of said file systems). ImgBurn basically builds the complete set of file system descriptors when performing its calculation and that's how it knows exactly how big the resulting image will be or how much of the disc will be used up. One thing is for certain, no 2 files can share the same physical sector (unless they're essentially 0 bytes in size), so you always round up the file size to a multiple of 2048 (the sector size).

Maybe try convertxtodvd or one of the DVDfab products?

Yup, that sounds like wondershare to me. It certainly isn't ImgBurn. Maybe a firmware update for your Sony will make it more compatible? Have you updated it?