dbminter

Someone on Amazon.com took umbrage to my constant (CORRECT!) berating of CMC Magnetics in my reviews of recordable CD, DVD, and BD discs. They asked me what I had against them. Only that they make junk. And that I was out over $1,000 due to their DVD-R's before I was finally clued into them. Then they made the idiotic leap of logic that if every optical company "trusts" CMC to make their media, then it must be good. Yeah, it can't be that they trust CMC to turn them a profit by making cheap products!

Haven't had the chance to actually watch the contents on a DVD player yet. Just loaded them in Media Player Classic. It looks like the resolution is kept relatively intact. No really discernible artifacts that weren't present in the Video CD. Looks like nothing got cut off the top or bottom. So, looks like this process will work. Thanks!

I have started a test conversion and it looks good thus far. I did as you said and renamed the .DAT file to .MPG. ConvertXToDVD loaded it fine. If I had just examined the discs contents, I could have found the source files. They were the largest files on the disc and in a folder called MPEGAV, so that would help me figure out, "Hey, these must be MPEG Audio/Video." I might not have tried renaming the .DAT file to .MPG without you suggesting it, though.

Now, granted, I had one Optiarc that I replaced after 6 months but it wasn't because it had stopped burning correctly. It needed replacing because after ejecting discs, every time I touched the disc in the tray to remove it, the drive reloaded the tray! This happens sometimes to drives and the only solution is to replace them. Granted, this is the only one I ever had that happen on, though.

Some older Blu-Ray burners only burned Blu-Rays. So, when shopping for a Blu-Ray burner, check its specs to make sure it burns CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray. Most Blu-Ray burners made today support all formats. My Pioneer does.

Most of my experience has been 12 months is average. However, my last drive, a Pioneer 209 Blu-Ray burner, is approaching 2 years old in May! The only problem it has now is a very few times when I press the Eject button, the drive light lights up but the tray doesn't eject. A second press then ejects it. I replaced my dying LG Blu-Ray burner with a 2nd Pioneer 209, so now I have a 2 year old 209 and a few months old 209.

Do you know how long you've had the drive? My experience with Optiarcs was they'd last about 6 to 12 months before needing replacing. And I had many Optiarcs over the years. If UltraISO returns this error, too, then it's probably some kind of hardware error, definitely. In my experience, I'd be more inclined to replace the DVD burner first and see if that fixes the problem.

Yeah, I'd blame the cheap CMC Magnetics disc, too. CMC is the worst manufacturer of optical discs out there. As far as DVD+R DL goes, about the only reliable ones are the DataLife Plus kind from Verbatim. However, you won't find them in stores, as all you'll find there is cheap CMC stuff. You have to get them online.

Please post the log if you still have it. Also, is this drive an internal or an external drive? My experience has been power resets, if that's the source of the problem, tend to happen more on my external drives than internal ones.

When you load audio tracks, the progress appears in the lower left as text that says the percentage complete. It says something like Analysing Track. For short tracks, this text message will appear and disappear quickly.

I use ConvertXToDVD to convert container files to standard DVD VIDEO_TS compliant files. So, as you say, I can just rename the streams to MPG.

I can also think of another reason to convert to DVD. There are more than 2 discs, I was wrong it turns out. Each disc has 3 streams. I may be able to put all those streams, probably, on one DVD. Saves space.

I wanted to convert them because I wasn't aware Video CD was universally supported by all DVD players. I thought I'd eventually encounter some DVD player that wouldn't play them.

I have 2 10 year plus old Video CD's. I don't know anything about them, like what created them, etc. And I wouldn't know where to begin on the subject, but does anyone know how I can possibly convert these Video CD's? To either DVD/VIDEO_TS or some kind of container file like .AVI, etc. that I can then convert to DVD? Thanks!

Yeah, as I had said, I tried what someone once posted here on the forums. I didn't get it to work. Now I know why because it can't work.

I've been told this works but I tried it once and didn't get it to work, so you can try it if you wish. You can download the OpenCandy wrapped installer to your home computer. Then you can supposedly use 7-Zip to extract the actually installer of ImgBurn from the .EXE, the one that the OpenCandy wrapper runs after it runs its offers. This .EXE is the actual ImgBurn installer without OpenCandy. Then you can try to bring that installer .EXE into work and see if your admins will allow it to run. As I said, I never got this to work, but you may have better luck than I. Most people have better luck than I so you may have a higher confidence level in getting this to work.

I was formatting some BD-RE DL discs and I discovered that in the Log, the Media Type is listed as BD-RE. The number of layers returned is 2 in the window to the right in Write mode. So, does ImgBurn just return the Media Type as BD-RE for DL media because BD-RE DL is still a type of BD-RE?

Now, when you say Source, under what Mode? Write, Read, or Verify? It sounds like you can get the source to be found under Verify. Under Read, a USB stick won't show up because Read only reads CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/virtual drives. Under Write, it should detect a USB as a source for reading an ISO for burning.

So, you're trying to image a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/virtual drive contents with ImgBurn and have it write the image file to a USB flash drive? Then you're trying to use Verify to open the file from the USB stick? Also, you may need to format the stick anyway. If you're trying to put an image file on it, it needs to be formatted for NTFS for a full image file, depending on if it's greater than 4 GB. Or set ImgBurn to file split the image file when it creates it so it will fit on the stick's file system. Or maybe ImgBurn changes this setting automatically when it writes the image file based on the file system. I forget. I inserted a flash drive just now to see if they're supported. ImgBurn found my flash drive for writing and loading image files. If ImgBurn isn't recognizing flash drives for you, it's beyond me.

Well, if Windows isn't detecting the USB stick is inserted, then you can't format it at all. If it's not there, you can't initiate any drive functions on it. My experience with USB drives not being detected is first to try shutting down the PC and restarting Windows after a few seconds of powering off. That would be the first thing I'd try. Leave the USB stick plugged in when you restart Windows so Windows can detect it on start.

I was trying to see if the issue may be the Sony disc. I don't know if it's a compatibility issue with the drive; I was just isolating if Sony was the problem as Sony has made 95% junk since 2002. The BD-RE I had with Sony's name on it died before its 5th rewrite. I tried a Sony BD-R but it even failed to finish burning.

Oh, yeah, should have checked the times in the log. If you've not tried giving it like 15 minutes for 4x, you should. I know 8x DVD+RW takes 9 to 10.

Do you have anything else other than a Sony made DVD+RW to test with?

It's not perfect, but that's the fault of the website that ImgBurn links to versus anything the author can do about it. It just sends a drive ID string to a web site's search function. So, it depends on how well the website is documented for firmware. I know for things like USB drives, the firmware are a real issue. I don't think I ever had a USB drive that that site ever found a firmware revision for. It's probably because the actual drive inside the enclosure has a certain ID string, but the USB drive as a whole is given an entirely different ID string by the manufacturer.

BTW, you had asked about finding the firmware revision for your drive. Probably the best way and also a way to check for firmware updates is to use ImgBurn's firmware check. In Write mode, right click on the drive in the target drop down and choose Check for firmware updates, which I think is the last option in the list. Before it checks for a firmware update, it should tell you what your current revision number is.