dbminter

The disc is either partially unreadable after all these years or your drive has difficulty reading the disc. Not every drive will read every disc. For instance, LG drives won't read things that Pioneer drives will and LG drives will read in somethings ASUS drives won't. The only thing to really do at this point is try a different make, manufacturer, and model of DVD drive and see if it can read the disc. While there's no guarantee the disc IS still fully readable and you just didn't happen to get a different DVD drive that DIDN'T read it, too, it's the next step I would try.

There's no sure fire way to say with 99.99% certainty that hardware has failed. What I do is if I get a failure 3 times in a row, I consider that a pattern indicating hardware failure and test replacing the hardware first. If that doesn't fix the issue, the problem is most likely down to the media being used. Either a bad batch of discs or the manufacturer changed the manufacturing process and the discs don't work anymore. Don't know what you mean by "directory space," but I think you mean how much space is free on the target device where you're creating the image to. Space on a hard drive, etc. has no bearing on how well an optical device works. Besides, 20 GB is not small. Unfortunately, I haven't bought a DVD drive in like 15 years. I exclusively use BD burners now. What I use is the ASUS BW BD internal half height burner and put it in a VanTec USB 3.0 enclosure. You should avoid slim drives as they generally are junk as writers. I have to use an enclosure because hardly any manufactures make PC cases with half height bays in them anymore unless you're building a custom rig. Your logs are showing failures on both Ritek DVD and CD media. It would seem highly unlikely that both the CD's and the DVD's would be at fault simultaneously. So, that would indicate it's the drive that has died. The same laser writes to CD and DVD, although it is generally the case when a drive dies that when one media fails, like DVD, the opposite media generally still writes okay. However, that is, obviously, not universal behavior. If you're experiencing read or write issues to optical media, that would have little bearing on the physical health of an HDD. If you get read or write errors, read/writes from/to the HDD cease until the read/write operations complete from the optical media.

How long have you used this burner? You say it's the "same device" but I don't know if it's the same physical unit you've always used when it worked before in the past or if this is a replacement. If it's the same burner and you've used it for a length of time, it may have just died on you. That could explain why 1 burn worked but the next 3 didn't. It was working on the first and died right afterwards, before the 2nd and 3rd. You said you've used the same DVD's so it seems you're fine using RITEKF1 media, although be aware that it is sometimes cheap media in certain parts of the world. Could have gotten a bad batch of discs, too. I recently encountered a bad batch of BD-R's that would complete writes and verifies, but, within a few days, most of those burns were partially or totally unreadable. So, some were good, but most were bad.

I doubt it's a defective unit insomuch as a replacement will fix the problem. I'd be willing to bet it's simply Sony's typical junk that doesn't work right from the design point of view.

If you're saying you played the FLAC files from the DVD-R on your PC fine, then the problem is your BR player. It may have an issue with Verbatim DataLife Plus DVD-R or just DVD-R in general. Or some other issue involving playing back files or FLAC files in particular from optical disc.

Could be the Sony hardware. Sony has generally made junk since 2002. I once had a Sony DVD player that refused to play DVD-R's made by... Sony. And this was back when Sony made their own DVD-R, before farming it out to Ritek. I don't think there is such a thing as "DataLife Plus" BD-R. In North America, there's only the VERBAT-IM media, which is generally high quality. (I received a batch of bad Verbatim BD-R recently.)

I don't recommend any speed rewritable DVD for long term archival storage. The only reason I use 8x DVD+RW is for temporary copies of data. Short term storage or to shuttle between devices. That's why I prefer 8x. They write faster and since I only care about temporary archival storage, I like the speed advantage. The last time I looked, I only found like 4 lots on eBay from Imation of 25 disc cake stacks. Basically, I couldn't find any "new" in an online store. Which was why I stocked up last time I found some on eBay and purchased like 200 blanks. Basically, any of the DataLife Plus DVD+/-R SL/DL from Verbatim are what I've used for like 20 years now. NOT the Life Series you find in brick and mortar stores. Those are CMC Magentics media, the worst out there, which is ironic as CMC now OWNS Verbatim! The DataLife Series are the MCC/MKM Mitsubishi high quality blanks that you generally only find in online stores like Amazon.com.

If you burned the FLAC files directly to a disc and if the FLAC files play correctly as a source file on your PC and if the FLAC files don't play correctly off of the disc you burned them on, that sounds like a lower quality disc you burned to is not playing back correctly in the device. What device was this disc played on? Was it a CD disc or DVD/BD? If this skipping is on a standalone player, have you also tried playing these FLAC files from a disc in your PC? One check to perform is to isolate one of these FLAC's where there is missing audio and copy them from the disc on your PC in Windows/File Explorer and see if the copies are still missing data. IF the copies are still missing audio, then you know the files were burned that way on the disc, most likely. Do you have a log from where you burned these FLAC files to a disc? That would say if you used a lower quality disc or not.

Unfortunately, there's only one manufacturer left on 8x DVD+RW: Ritek. And they're beginning to wrap up production on those. Unfortunately, you can't always trust Verbatim either. I had a recent batch of bad Verbatim quality BD-R. They all completed writes and Verifies, but, within less than 5 days were either partially or completely unreadable. So, I TRIED reburning the data, but some of it was corrupt and unrecoverable. Luckily, I caught the bad batch within 3 months of using the last disc I'd burned and only less than 15 had been used. Could have been worse.

I guess the easiest question is: does AVS use DirectShow filters to encode audio?

Pioneer's are the best readers. I've never had them fail to read a disc that other drives wouldn't when the disc was, in fact, actually readable. Pioneer's, though, are useless for writing 8x DVD+RW. (The 2213 writes to 8x DVD+RW, but it still needs a firmware update as it only writes to them at 6x max for the entire capacity write time.) For more than 10 years, they've borked the firmware for those and REFUSE to address my repeated tech support attempts with them. Pioneer's USED to work fine with them. LG's are the worst readers I've found. ASUS are pretty good, only failing on the odd disc here and there. But, when LG's and ASUS fail, the Pioneer had read all fully readable discs.

The code is only 11 lines long.

I don't know this, but there could be a factor in Windows/File Explorer that copies the files but due to the read errors does not copy them correctly. Another factor may be in the difference between sector copies and file operation copies. Sectors would be more sensitive to read errors as opposed to an attempt to perform a copy operation. Plus, the commands issued to an optical drive to read sectors versus a file read operation copy may be more sensitive to error correction.

I do what I can and hope it helps.

Could have been a bad blank. They happen. I recently tried to fully format a brand new DVD+RW but after like 30 minutes, it wasn't done. So, I canceled it and discovered what had happened: there was a large blob under the data surface where the writable area should have been. It came out of the factory that way. The next one was fine. So were the 2 after that.