dbminter

Freemake Video Converter is a free application that will take most container files and convert them to VIDEO_TS. It will only create chapters every 15 minutes, though, and the free version will leave an about 3 second watermark against a black screen right after the video, at the end. I guess the paid version removes this, but I don't know. You might be able to edit it later to remove this watermark. I use ConvertXToDVD, but it's paid software. Still, it's done the trick for me for the past 6 years. It creates menus, but you can always use DVDShrink to just copy over the main movie VIDEO_TS it creates to make a DVD without a menu.

It used to be worse. When I first started the world of DVD burning 15 years ago, there was only 1x media. And what would invariably happen is you'd get to 99% complete on a burn and then it would crap out, wasting an hour's time. DVD Copy probably didn't do Verifies or back when you were using it, the Pioneer was still alive. The easiest way to determine if you have a firmware update is open ImgBurn in write mode and select the drive you want to check the firmware for from the drop down list of target drives in Write mode. Right click on the drive entry in the bar and choose Check for firmware update in the context menu. It will tell you your current revision before opening your web browser to the firmware site ImgBurn checks. Now, sometimes the site won't find firmware for your drive based on its drive string. USB drives are notorious for not being found on that site. And if you want to check the model manually, open ImgBurn and in the log window that displays opening information on startup of ImgBurn, find your drive listed in the log. It will tell you the drive model string and firmware version currently installed. Now, sometimes model drive strings are vastly different from what the model name actually is. But, it beats cracking open the tower unless you have to.

Amazon.com is where I get my media from, too, because you only buy the quality DataLife Plus/MKM stuff online. Well, you can buy good Verbatim BD-R from Office Depot brick and mortar stores, but only in packs of 10 that are far less economical than buying them in packs of 50 from Amazon.com. Well, the media can't be 100% ruled out. If you've used them before in this drive fine for a period of time, then you can. However, if this is the first time you've ever tried them, then that Pioneer may not necessarily like that media. For instance, as weird as it sounds, before a firmware update fixed the issue, the 2209 had a problem where it would write to 8x DVD+R DL MKM media that was branded but NOT the inkjet variety, even though they shared the same Disc ID. The only difference was one had a branded surface and the other was inkjet printable. Shouldn't make a difference, but it did.

Yeah, that's the MKM I mentioned earlier. The good stuff made by Mitsubishi. MKM is on the DVD-R and DVD+R DL. VERBAT is on the BD-R.

It really doesn't matter what the label on the package is or where they were manufactured. What matters is who manufactured them. And that is determined by the Disc ID returned by ImgBurn. For instance, Verbatim sells 2 kinds of DVD-R and DVD+R DL: the good kind and the bad kind. The bad kind are manufactured by CMC Magnetics and are sold in brick and mortar stores and online as their Life series. The good kind are MKM media made by Mitsubishi, sold only online under the DataLife Plus brand, NOT Life. The BD-R DL you were failing on said they were made by Verbatim. However, I have no experience with DL media except for BD-RE DL. So, from experience, I can't say anything about BD-R DL. But, what the ImgBurn log returned was they were quality Verbatim BD media. The Verbatim BD-R I always use have VERBAT in their Disc ID string like your BD-R DL did. Burning at slower speeds when you're experiencing problems is generally a good idea. Personally, I've never had any problems burning at Max speeds, so I leave my burns at Max.

Hey, no problem. We've all been there where we didn't know what we know now. It's how we learn. By asking. A red AnyDVD icon in the Notification area means AnyDVD is active. This means it can interfere with Verifies and writes of certain kinds of media. Write once media like BD-R shouldn't be affected by AnyDVD, but I haven't tested it yet. I do know it interferes with DVD+RW when writing when it's active and doesn't interfere with DVD-R writes when active. Try right clicking on AnyDVD and unchecking Enable AnyDVD to turn it gray like you suggested. Then, I'd next try to do a Read of one of these discs that failed Verify. This would test if AnyDVD is interfering with Verifies. If it still fails, then AnyDVD might have interfered with the writing of the BD-R DL. You should try another BD-R DL burn with AnyDVD grayed out and see if you get the same results. You say when you use File/Windows Explorer to write this information to BD-R DL, these discs play without pixelation? If that's the case, the "logical" answer would be AnyDVD might be interfering with the Write. However, of course, the logical answer is not always the correct one. It could be the way the drive is interpreting the commands. ImgBurn just sends out generic burn commands. Some drives may not interpret them correctly. Unfortunately, there's no real answer to which burner you should get. The bottom line is no drive does everything it should because the manufacturers don't know what they're doing. Pioneer used to be one all be all, until they borked the firmware with 8x Ritek DVD+RW. Plus, the general quality decline I've experienced with them. Unfortunately, I need 2 different drives to do different things. What I described in my last reply. If you had luck with your Pioneer model in the past, then your best bet probably is to keep sticking with that kind. As for if you should update the firmware, it depends on what you want to do with it. I don't have the 209. I have the 2209. However, the firmware revisions are the same for both models. This indicates to me the 209 might have the same firmware bork in it that the 2209 does. Despite being 209 as a substring in both model numbers, the 2209 writes to BD XL media and the 209 doesn't. So, it could be because of the different laser necessarily to burn BD-R XL media, the lastest firmware for 209 might not bork 8x Ritek DVD+RW. If you plan on never writing to 8x Ritek DVD+RW, you should probably update the firmware. And who's to say this borked DVD+RW writing isn't across all DVD+RW models and speeds? I don't have any other kind of DVD+RW to test with. When I need to replace my 2209 or the next time I need to replace my LG, I'm going to either try the 209 and see if its firmware is borked or try the newer BDR-211UBK. The only difference with that model is it supports 4K HD Blu-Ray playback. But, depending on the laser and the firwmare, it might write 8x Ritek DVD+RW fine. I won't know until I test both of them. I can always return them with Amazon.com if they don't. And I don't really need 2209's BD XL capability as I've never owned such a disc. I believe the 2209 might also write to M-Disc, but my LG does the same thing. And I've only ever burned like 5 of those. So, I don't really need that capability either. As for updating the firmware, you can downgrade firmware, but it takes some other tools, a little work, and a little knowledge of what you're doing. In fact, I didn't know it could be done until LUK told me. So, you can always regress back to the firmware one revision less if you find DVD+RW doesn't work right.

IMO, Pioneer quality has gone downhill over the last few years. I still have my first one that works fine as far as I know after 2 years. My 2nd one still works fine as far as I know after 1 year. The only reason I replaced either one was a design flaw in their manufacturing. After a certain amount of time, Eject commands and pressing the Eject button don't work the first time they're issued. Issuing them again causes them to work. ImgBurn's auto eject function after burning/verifying, when turned on, seems to work fine, though. Then came the story of my 3rd Pioneer Blu-Ray drive. It stopped writing quality Verbatim BD-R after 7 months. My 4th one was worse! It failed right out of the box to write to these same Verbatims! Plus, Pioneer borked the latest firmware so they don't write properly to Ritek 8x DVD+RW. It used to write to them fine for years, but then they released the last firmware they will probably ever release for this drive and it borked those discs. So, I wouldn't put it past needing to replace a Pioneer after less than a year. I have an LG modern burner, too, but their modern model hasn't had a firmware update in 2 years. And, it needs it. It writes giant floppy formatted discs at half the speed of the Pioneer. Plus, it's a rotten reader and absolutely almost always fails to write to BD-RE DL media. So, I have the LG primarily to write DVD+RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-R, BD-RE SL, and BD-R and the Pioneer for reading discs and for writing BD-RE DL and discs as giant floppies. There's no real way to test a dying burner. You're already doing it with discs that have passed and are now failing. You can test if it's the discs by getting another drive, putting it in, and testing it. But, there's no way of telling if it's the discs or your burner if they fail again. Wait, if you have AnyDVD running while ImgBurn is burning, you absolutely shouldn't be doing that. AnyDVD can cause problems with Verfies if it's running while a Verify is being performed. Plus, you shouldn't have AnyDVD running when burning to DVD+RW. It will cause an error in the write that will bork the disc from being rewritten properly until it is fully erased again. The take away is you should really only have AnyDVD running when you need it. Try disabling AnyDVD and perform a Read on one of these discs that was failing. See if it will read, however, I doubt it will. Experience says there is nothing wrong with ImgBurn. Otherwise, every drive I've had to replace wouldn't be miraculously fixed when the drive was replaced. Plus, you're experiencing problems at the layer change. Experience says this is because of cheap quality discs, disc incompatibility with the drive, or a dying drive.

I notice the errors happen right at the start of Layer 1. However, what's weird is the Empty Sector errors. I can't comment on those, but my experience has generally been that if a drive is failing to Verify at the layer change, it's one of a two things. 1.) your drive doesn't like that Disc ID brand of media 2.) your drive needs replacing How long have you had this drive? Have you used these type of discs before with success? You're using quality Verbatim media, it seems, so it's probably not that your drive doesn't like those discs. Unless you've never gotten success with them before. They don't appear to be cheap quality discs, so that's probably not the problem. Layer changes almost always are problematic when errors occur. I just replaced a Blu-Ray drive last week because it wasn't writing DVD+R DL correctly anymore. It was failing Verifies at the, yes, you guessed, layer change.

It happens. We all make boners at some time in our lives. My biggest one was, as a computer science major, I know you NEVER plug in the power supply to an internal peripheral with the power turned on. And, still, I did it anyway, without thinking about it! Partly fried the HDD.

That's the AnyDVD log. We need the ImgBurn log. There would be no burn/verify errors in the AnyDVD log. Unless this AnyDVD log is an attempt to read one of the failed burns that ImgBurn failed on.

I believe, last time I checked, Philips DVD-R's sold at Dollar Tree and Big Lots were CMC Magnetics. So, Philips CD-R's are probably CMC's, too. Meaning your drive may not like them because they are cheap media. Without the log there's no way of telling who made your CD-R. I'm pretty sure Philips themselves didn't make them.

I haven't used Daemon Tools in so long I've forgotten pretty much everything I knew about using it. I use Virtual CloneDrive now.

Ah, yes, you did. I forgot that.

My empirical evidence says otherwise. I know it makes no sense, but none of my 5 DVD players would recognize these discs and all 3 of my optical discs, 2 SATA's and one USB, would flash their lights forever attempting to recognize them. It sounds impossible, it makes no logical sense, but it was never said that the improbable can't happen. I've had it happen to me 3 times. ImgBurn is always set to Eject after writing, so it should have "cleared" the drive of anything after writing. Now, I think all these discs were DVD+RW's. It's possible, and really the only logical solution, that they wrote fine, were readable on Verify, but on eject after Verify, they "died" because they're random access memory and could have been "destroyed" with each read of sectors from it. Reads shouldn't affect writing, but it's the only logical explanation. The discs were close to dying and the laser power, though set to read, was hot enough that it destroyed the sector(s) necessary to recognize the disc as a loadable disc.

What I don't understand is something I've had happen a few times. A burn will complete without errors, it will Verify without errors, yet the disc is unreadable. You insert it into a player and it won't recognize. And when I insert it back into an optical drive to try and check the disc, the optical drive light flashes forever, meaning the disc is not readable. I've never understood that one.

I've also had weird cases where ImgBurn would have 20 Retries failing to read a bad sector, and I'd tell it to keep trying. It would Retry a few more times, read a few more KB of data, and then run out of Retries and ask again. I'd eventually tell it to just keep trying without bugging me and though it would be super slow, a few KB at a time, it would eventually extract the bad sectors. And the data would be fine when played back.

I've had weird cases where I HAD to make a copy of a DVD I bought in order to play it. Panasonic stand alone DVD players don't like to play some DVD's. Like Day Of The Animals and Captain Power Disc 4. They simply don't recognize they've been inserted. But, if you make a copy of them, the Panasonic plays do play them. I've had 2 Panasonic stand alones that did this. And I've read other reports of people with the Captain Power boxed set who can't play Disc 4 on their Panasonic DVD players.

Yeah, I had an entire cack stack of 50 DVD-R's rated at 16x that only burned at 8x. The rest burned at 16x. For whatever reason, that one half was all capped at 8x. I've never had that happen again. Go figure.

What I can't understand is a burn that completes, a Verify that completes, and the disc is STILL unreadable. Yes, I've had that happen before. I also fail to see how a burn can complete but the Verify fails. I would think if the data is corrupt when it's written, why doesn't the write fail? For instance, on DVD+R DL's, when drives fail, they will write them fine but fail Verify at the layer change. But, that's the nature of the beast.

Could be down to how each of the different drives in the different PC's "reads" the data? Maybe one drive does some kind of data reading that the other doesn't? As long as the discs read to an image, I wouldn't be too worried about differing CRC's. If you're really worried, then watch the discs' contents in a DVD player. If they play fine, then I wouldn't worry. There are so many other things in life to worry about.

The easiest solution is use a DVD+/-R DL or a BD-R. If this ISO is bootable, and as a Windows install disc it should be, then spanning across multiple discs probably won't work. The installer will look for all files in one location to install the OS. In fact, as far as I know, ONLY using a double layer recordable DVD or a recordable Blu-Ray disc will work in this case. Theoretically, if you wanted to span the ISO across multiple discs, you could create one DVD+-R with the boot image from the ISO, copy as many files from it to that bootable disc you're going to make as possible, and burn it. Then, create a 2nd disc with the rest of the files. However, this is very difficult. I've yet to get the hang of setting the various boot image settings in ImgBurn to correctly create my own OS install discs. And, as I said, I would think it's a waste of time as the install application would look for all the files across one disc. If you're not interested in this disc booting, you could just create 2 DVD's yourself, copying as many files as you can fit onto the first and then the remaining files onto the second. However, you'd be swapping out DVD's at least once during install, IF it even works at all. As I said, the easiest solution is use a double layer recordable DVD or a recordable Blu-Ray.

Must have been the DataLife Plus Verbatim CD-R's. Mine are also said to be made in China.

Yes, the DualShock was the controller for the Playstation that introduced vibration and dual analog sticks. I, too, have no idea why he included that and why that matters. I, too, have said don't keep using the Moser Baer discs. If you keep reusing those Disc ID's, you're getting nowhere when you keep burning with them. Troubleshooting the problem will go nowhere because we already know your drive has a problem with those or they're cheap discs.

When you say the CD works in your friends PC, do you mean you can burn these discs on his PC or that they play in his CD player? It must be you can burn these Moser Baer discs on his PC because the first log shows you didn't complete a burn before. So, you're either testing these discs that worked or you're burning on his PC. Don't keep trying the Moser Baer discs. They may be cheap media causing the failures or your burner may not like that particular brand of Verbatim Moser Baer and that is causing the random failures. Try getting the DataLife Plus CD-R. They're the quality Verbatim CD-R. However, depending on where you live, you may not be able to find DataLife Plus. The fact that some of your burns work and some don't lean towards the idea that Moser Baer CD-R may be cheap media. Or your drive doesn't like that manufacturer, so your results will randomly work or fail.

In this burn that failed when you switched the media, what's the Disc ID in the Destination Media Type listed in the log? For instance, above when you posted the log before: I 20:33:30 Destination Media Type: CD-R (Disc ID: 97m17s06f, Moser Baer India)