dbminter

I never considered protection plans because I know the instant I'd by one, miraculously, they'd last for all eternity and I'd be out my money. And, most likely, they would give up the ghost the day AFTER the protection plan expires. Yes, I have had that happen before with electronics. The day AFTER. Plus, I'm sure they have some legalese that they can worm their way out of paying you back/replacing your drive, saying it was normal wear and tear or you broke it. And what can you do? The laws were written to protect the major corporation's bucks.

By testing, I mean take a blank of every media you intend to burn with the drive, create an image to test it with, preferably an image that nearly fills the disc, and burn those images to the blanks. Just test if they finish Writes without error and finish Verfiies without error. Writes aren't as important as Verifies as far as I'm concerned. Writes will often times pass but will fail on Verifies of those Writes. You can, of course, perform disc scans, attempt to read the data back to image files, test playing movie discs on a stand alone player, etc. if you want to. I don't generally go that far. I just mostly care that they pass Verifies. And, to an extent, Writes, because one must be done before the other can be, of course. Be aware that M-Discs cost about 5 times as much as standard media. However, it can be worth the cost if you're really concerned about obtaining archival quality media. For instance, a DVD+R can cost between 50 cents and a dollar. An M-Disc DVD+R will set you back about $5. So, if you're willing to invest in them, by all means, get the M-Disc drive. You may find yourself using them more than I do. I'm just mostly concerned about the decreasing quality of my 2209 drives I've gotten. The first one still works, save for the Eject button issue. The 2nd one I still use for reading discs and for writing BD-RE DL and BD-RE SL as giant floppies. The 3rd one I had died after 7 months when it stopped writing BD-R properly. The 4th one was borked right out the box, failing on BD-R. Maybe I just got flukes, but I worry about possible quality decline of Pioneer drives.

I'd go with the Pioneer over the LG, but be sure to run tests on all media you're going to use with it to make sure the firmware works and you didn't get a low quality drive. As far as I know, the Pioneer is not Riplocked. I've copied many DVD's I've made with my Panasonic standalone DVD recorder and they copied in under 5 minutes, which makes me think the drive isn't Riplocked. However, I don't know if Riplock is only "kicked in" with CSS protected DVD Video discs. The Pioneer is definitely a better reader than the LG is. I don't recommend LG's for reading drives because I've encountered many discs where I tried to read in an LG but it wouldn't read certain sectors that the Pioneer would. However, I just recently encountered a DVD+RW where the Pioneer wouldn't read it but the LG would. Go figure. I've downgraded firmware 3 times on my Pioneers without issue. It's relatively risk free, but ANY firmware update, even updating with official firmware, has a potential risk any time. The most difficult aspect is extracting the actual firmware from Pioneer's .EXE with 7Zip. And you have to download a separate utility to install the regressed firmware. And it's command line driven, so you have to be relatively okay with Command Prompt and entering arguments into command line executables. There are 2 significant differences between the two drives. The 2209 model is the BDXL model. It writes to triple layer BD media and to M-Disc media. I've never burned any triple layer BD media but I have burned a handful of M-Disc BD media. If you're not interested in those functions, and I can live without them, then it's not necessarily worth it. I've never burned triple layer media because the moment you start adding layers, you get more potential problems writing and Verifying. M-Disc is a special type of media that costs more but will last a LOT longer than regular media. It's archival quality media. Think of it as using a laser but chiseling bits in stone and you can see why it lasts longer. M-Disc DVD media is readable in any DVD drive or player that supports reading DVD+R. As for BD, I don't know how well BD M-Disc works if you try to make a BD Video disc with it and it being playable in a standalone DVD player. I've received a few M-Disc media with Pioneer drives I've bought as a freebie and I always made backups of important data to the BD M-Disc. The 209 is relatively the same as the 2209 except it lacks the BDXL and M-Disc support. Now, both the 2209 and 209 have the same latest firmware revision number: 1.34. So, I don't know if the 209 1.34 is borked with 8x Ritek DVD+RW or not. The next drive I need, I'm going to try the 209 since I've never tried that before. The 1.34 firmware may be fine, but I don't know if it will work for Ritek 8x DVD+RW. But, I should be able to downgrade the firmware on it as I have with 3 of the 2209's.

If you never use rewritable discs, it may not matter. After I discovered 1.34 was borked for 8x Ritek DVD+RW, I stopped testing. I can't say for certain the firmware isn't borked for anything else, though. And it may only be on Ritek 8x DVD+RW. Or it may be on all DVD+RW. Or all rewritable discs. It's hard to say. Sort of like the ASUS internal I returned. I tested 2 copies of the model and it did this on both, so it's a design flaw. It destroyed 8x Ritek DVD+RW and Verbatim BD-RE DL. It supports rewritable media, but destroys them on attempting to write to them! So, what's the point of that? It's a shame because my ASUS USB drive performs flawlessly. Anyway, it turned me off to all future ASUS products. I can say the 1.33 firmware is fine. So, if you get a Pioneer with 1.34 firmware, you can always downgrade to 1.33 with a little work. If the drive isn't 1.34 firmware, you can always just get 1.33 and install that only. Or go for 1.34 and hope you have results.

MEI is the mark that Panasonic made them. Panasonic made quality DVD-R that I used for the first time in 2002 back when they were $15 each. Panasonic also makes the quality BD-RE SL I use instead of Verbatim's cheap ass CMC ones. Yeah, I don't remember what the blanks were in question in the past posts except that some of the complaints were using Verbatim. And it was really confusing as, for DL DVD media, Verbatim MKM was really the only high quality choice out there. So, it was a little baffling that people were getting all these errors on them. However, I never tested them in my Pioneer, which has a high rate of success with media... well, when you don't use the current firmware for DVD+RW.

What is the Disc ID of the Panasonic BD-R's? Panasonic may have put their name of them, but they may not have necessarily made them. Put one in a drive, open ImgBurn in Write mode, and check the Disc ID in the pane of information on the right hand side. For instance, Verbatim puts its name on its media, but they farm out to Mitsubishi for their good DataLife Plus stuff and to CMC for their Life Series junk as well as their BD-RE, even though their BD-R and BD-RE DL are quality Verbatim discs. They used to make quality BD-RE but now they farm out to CMC I've had 3 of the WH16NS40's. I tested all 3 of them when I got them for the first time. They all did the same thing, and they will continue doing the same thing until LG updates the firmware. However, LG hasn't updated the firmware for this drive in 2 years. As for success with BD-R DL, I can only recall the failures I've seen with Verbatim discs. I don't even know what hardware they were using. There was worry that the quality of the Verbatim BD-R DL might have dropped. I wouldn't have known as I have zero experience with any brand's BD-R DL.

I don't know for sure if I ever had the WH14NS40, although I think I had one before years ago as my first LG BD burner. Back then, I am pretty sure I never tried burning a DL BD media before. I think I never started it until I got a Pioneer. And I've never tried BD-R DL. Lots of people have reported lots of failures here with BD-R DL media, even Verbatim. I've only ever burned Verbatim BD-RE DL.

The only reason I have an LG WH16NS40 is because the latest firmwares for Pioneer's BDR-209M are borked for Ritek 8x DVD+RW's. I would keep getting the Pioneers, but the last one of these I had was borked right out of the box. Failed to write to BD-R's that my 2nd 209, which I still have, would. And the 3rd Pioneer I had, before that borked one, died on BD-R after 7 months. So, I have begun to question the quality of Pioneer drives over the last few years. Especially since I have my first 2 and they're still working after 2 years except for a design flaw in the model. After a few months, the Eject button don't work when first pressed. Pressing it a 2nd time works. A manual Eject command from ImgBurn does the same thing, but the forced Eject on Writes before Verifies always works. The LG WH16NS40 has its own killers. It does not write to dual layer BD and BD-RE at ALL correctly. Verify will fail 9 times out of 10 at the layer change. Plus, when you format BD-RE SL as a giant floppy in Windows/File Explorer, it writes to these discs at half the rate of speed of the Pioneer. Those are you two best options, and neither of them is great. I have one of each because of the problems both represent. I would try another Pioneer and simply use the downgrade utility for the firmware if you find it can't burn your DVD+RW correctly. The LG, otherwise, produces quality burns with quality Verbatim media. However, the last WH16NS40 I had needed replacing after 5 months because though it continued to write to everything else fine, it died on writing DVD+R DL. Always failed Verify at the layer change.

Oh, they won't even last half a decade. Maybe in the old days, CD drives were rated at a decade, but I've never seen an optical burner that lasted even last half a decade. I've only ever had 2 Blu-Ray burners that came close to 2 years. It's a combination of moving parts and the heat generated by the drive when in use. It has moving parts, so it's going to eventually wear out. But, before the moving parts will ever wear out, the drive will just "burn up." The heat of electricity constantly going through it and the heat of the burning laser simply generates temperatures that will wear out a drive faster. So, how often the drive is used will be a factor, yes. If they're used rarely, then, maybe you might get a few years out of a drive. I have 15 years of optical drive purchases. These have been my experiences. For instance, the last burner replacement I had to do was my LG BD burner because it stopped writing to DVD+R DL after 5 months.

If you've been using this drive for years, it's probably just reached the end of its life. On the extreme low end, you'll get 5 months out of an optical burner before it needs replacing. On the high end, 18 months to 2 years. If you really have had a drive that has lasted for years with relatively few issues, consider yourself pretty lucky. I'd peg it down to its age. The log you posted isn't very helpful. It's several logs contained in one log and, although I just glanced through it, I didn't see any errors reported in those logs. Just requests to cancel the Verifies. Without an actual error code, I doubt there's very little we can do.

Single layers are just as prone to be problematic if they're cheap, like CMC media. You've probably never encountered CMC's before. Hence why I always use Verbatim DataLife for CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R DL, and BD-R. Unfortunately, Verbatim BD-RE SL are a no go because they farm all of those out to CMC. Multiple layers just always introduce problems. Whether they're DVD or BD-R DL or BD-RE DL, lots of burns here fail at the layer change or Verifies will tend to fail at the layer change. That's why I stopped using DVD+R DL for DVD-9 sized data backups and went to BD-R for them. They burn faster, no 2nd layer to fail, and will last longer.

There's an old Spanish saying that we all learn the hard way eventually: the cheap comes out expensive. At least they're not CMC Magentics media. CMC is absolutely the worst media manufacturer out there. As for the manufacturers not producing quality material, well, blame the free market economy. It's actually kind of surprising that ANYONE still produces decent quality blanks. Taiyo Yuden went out of the manufacturing business because the market for blanks is drying up. So, why shouldn't a corporation, who only cares about profits, make product and charge you for a quality one? They also know most people don't know the difference between junk and quality media, so they prey on people's lack of knowledge to make What's really hard to swallow is when a "good" company like Verbatim also farms out to cheap media. Their Life Series is CMC media, and they do make DVD+R DL. I used to swear by Optodisc 15 years ago. Then, they switched to CMC and I was getting 50% failures. I never looked back to them after that. As LUK said, try the Verbatim DataLife MKM series of DVD+R DL. If you get failures on those, the likelihood is high that the problem is hardware related and may need replacing. You cannot find DataLife series in brick and mortar stores. Only online stores, like Amazon.com where I get mine from in the U.S. As I said, DON'T get Life Series from Verbatim. You want DataLife.

If you're not burning VIDEO_TS, then there should have been no reason a layer break selection would ever have been prompted. As for using cheap discs, I almost replied to your log that you were you were using RICOH DVD+R DL. Pretty much the only good DVD+R DL is the MKM brand from Verbatim DataLife Plus series (NOT Life Series.) although I had good luck with TDK in terms of successful burns and being still readable years later. I had a few Ritek DVD+R DL but more than half of them weren't readable after a year. Ricoh is pretty much the same thing as Ritek. It could be that you had a good burn or a series of good burns and that bad discs will pop up again later because that's the nature of cheaper media. Some will complete burns, some won't.

Yes, if you don't have a VIDEO_TS folder in the root directory of the Job you're building, you won't get a window prompting you for a layer break position. That's only on DVD Video discs. However, this should have nothing to do with any check conditions you'd be receiving. For help with that, as LUK said, we'll need a posted log of a failed burn with the error condition listed.

Well, now I don't know if my next tower model PC will be a Dell anymore. Dell has removed the full height 5 inch bays from the latest iteration of their XPS tower model PC's. It comes with 1 half height bay for a half height DVD burner. As far as I know, they don't even make half height BD burners and that's what I need. Even if they did make them, slim model external BD drives are junk, so I can't see internal half height drives being of any quality. So, I'd have to get an enclosure and buy full height drives for external use only. Plus, I preferred having 2 5 inch height bays in the Dell towers I've had before. I liked having 2 internal drives because I had some old DVD-9 images that were split across 2 DVD-5's. With only one drive, internal or external, I'd have to copy the parts from each disc to HD and create a new .DVD that way. I don't think I have too many more of these split images left anyway, but it was easier having 2 internal drives for this process. And I need BD drives. I've moved to BD for a lot of my dual layer DVD-9 needs. No more layer changes to worry about failing. So to Dell!

This may not actually be considered a bug. I can't replicate it with any frequency. It seems to be random, but it does happen randomly about 1 in 10 times. When I'm in Advanced Input mode, I drag and drop folders/files, create folders I want, etc. I X close the Advanced Input window, but instead of closing and ImgBurn doing its calculations on the input, the window sometimes goes minimized to the tray. I just open the minimized window, X close it again, and everything proceeds as it should, with the window closing and the calculations performed. It's actually been doing this for years and I just lived with it since I never could replicate it except randomly. But, after I got it just a moment ago, I thought I'd post it.

Well, there's probably some kind of intermediary at play, especially if it wanted to download a 4 GB file for the ImgBurn installer. The PUP "warning" used to be expected as some AV treated the bundled OpenCandy as an unwanted program. It was never a virus or anything malicious. It just offered free software downloads that you probably didn't want. However, nothing would be installed unless you blindly kept clicking OK without opting out. However, OpenCandy should have been removed from the ImgBurn download installers on the mirrors since the OpenCandy servers were taken offline. That PUP "warning" may be a false positive. It used to be flagged in the past for OpenCandy and Symantec's AV may just be flagging it based on its installer name. Without actually checking the file for anything internal. Or, who knows? Maybe OpenCandy has been replaced with something else that offers users an "alternate experience" when installing.

It's possible it could have just been fluke. That when plugged in the first time, inferring you never took the cable out until I suggested it, that it was "installed" incorrectly by Windows. Unplugging it and reinserting might have "cleared" the issue. It's rare, but it happens. Hence why sometimes people have luck switching USB ports to fix semaphore time out issues. Weird Windows issues just sometimes happen. I had one PC where I couldn't, out of the box, put a shortcut on the Desktop with the letter S in the name. Trying to name them with S in their names caused Windows to lock up. Considering, until you change the setting, Windows DEFAULTS to naming all new Desktop shortcuts with the words Shortcut To in their name, this issue was a deal killer for that PC, which went back to the store.

You've got some kind of reworked version that has been altered to access the Internet. Probably to download malware. Make sure you only download the installer from one of the mirrors here: http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download ImgBurn installer no longer accesses the Internet at all, I don't think. It did before for targeted marketing, but that was removed, I think.

That's odd. Your original post did come through as that's what prompted me to reply about keeping the image and testing the ports with it after a burn. I was a bit confused at first seeing the same post, for the most part, again. Now, it makes more sense.

Now, if you still have the image you burned before where you were getting the timeout, you could try hooking the drive up to the "bad" USB port and perform a manual Verify against a disc you burned where it failed. If it fails again, change the port and try again. If it doesn't fail, you can pretty much rule it down to that one port has some kind of issue. If you don't have the image, then, when you burn again on that port, keep the image, switch the port, and perform a manual Verify on the disc.

You know, I've got to be honest. I've rarely seen that tip actually work! I've heard it mentioned before but have rarely seen anyone report back that that fixed the issue. I don't know the specifics. Could be the USB port is going bad? Or the connection of that port to the motherboard. Also, be aware it may not have actually "fixed" the problem. It may be random and you only just encountered a case where it didn't show up when you switched the port. Hopefully, it will work long term, and I say if you find a solution that works, be thankful.

I would expect you can't just copy Dreamcast game CD's and expect them to work without some kind of mod chip or bypass method. You do have something like that, right?

Optical Quantum is not a brand I'm familiar with, so they're probably cheap discs. Any cheap manufacturer will probably almost always fail on double layer media. They did in the past with DVD DL so I don't see why that trend wouldn't continue with BD. I have heard of Philips, but my only experience with them was some DVD-R that CMC made. CMC is the worst optical manufacturer out there. But, that's no reason that Philips would use CMC for BD media. If CMC even makes BD DL media.

Let's say we have a VIDEO_TS that will fit on a DVD-5. We add that VIDEO_TS to a job that includes some root directory folders that increase the image size from a DVD-5 to a DVD-9. Where does ImgBurn "place" the VIDEO_TS? Layer 0 or Layer 1? Is there something in the DVD standard that says VIDEO_TS has to be on Layer 0 or start at Layer 0 and can expand beyond to Layer 1? I guess it may matter depending on the size of VIDEO_TS and the size of the extra contents? Meaning if the VIDEO_TS fits on the smaller layer, VIDEO_TS could go to that layer and the bigger layer for the rest of the data? I'm guessing Layer 0 is larger than Layer 1? I know that one layer is smaller in size than the other and I just guessed that Layer 0 is the bigger of the two. Thanks!