dbminter

About going up from CD and DVD and increasing the likelihood of errors, you are packing more data into basically the same amount of area when you go up to DVD. So, the likelihood of error on DVD does increases versus if you did it on CD. Sort of like video tape. You can cram a lot more movie on a VHS tape if you use SLP 6 hour mode, but the video quality greatly suffers over time. As does the likelihood of tracking control problems.

I got my first DVD video recorder at Sears. Then, I got an updated model from Panasonic with a VCR built into it in 2006 at Walmart. Last year, I completed a 2 to 3 year project to convert all of my VHS tapes to DVD. I had about 500. Once my local cable company switched to digital and required a box to receive cable, my DVD video recorder could no longer record from TV. So, I had this DVD video recorder sitting around doing nothing and a separate VCR connected to it and I decided to finally complete my library conversion project. I also connected an audio tape player to the DVD video recorder and converted my nearly 40 year old library of audio cassettes to DVD. I'd also use the DVD video recorder to record onto DVD-RAM, on the first Panasonic model, then on to DVD-RW on the updated one. I'd then shuttle the discs over to the PC where I'd do final processing on them. Edits and make my own menus, etc. My first DVD-R PC burner was bought for that purpose. Cost me $500 in 2002.

I believe the USB models of Zip were first introduced in 1999. It was more than just a DVD burner. It recorded video on to DVD. So, while it had a DVD burner drive in it, it also had other hardware and software necessary to record VHS and cable TV to DVD. So, there were things like a Time Base Corrector, which, back then, ran $500 on their own. By 2006, Panasonic, the innovator of the technology, was selling DVD video recorder and VCR combo units for $300.

$15 was the high quality Mitsubishi stuff from Panasonic. It was around the time I paid $999 for a first generation DVD video recorder. I didn't pay $15 a pop for very long. A few months later, I came across Optodisc, which used to make their own quality discs. Then, they switched to CMC, which was my first exposure to cheap discs. Those CMC discs were impossible to use with any kind of regularity. Those $15 discs were still readable until last year, when I made new archives so they would be newer discs. Oh, I remember those terrible buffer underrun days. My CD-R drive was plagued by it, and early DVD burners didn't have buffer underrun technology in them like they eventually would. You'd spend an hour writing to a DVD-R only to have it fail at 99% due to a buffer underrun. I can remember when the 100 MB Zip Drive disks were mass storage in 1995. 5.25" floppy drives had a "latch" on them. You'd push down the latch to keep the disk in place in the drive. 5.25" were my first exposure to floppy discs. I had a Commodore 64 around 1987 whose external storage was 5.25" floppies. My first BASIC class in high school, we also used 5.25" floppies. For Pascal in my senior year, the school replaced all the TRS 80's with IBM AT PC's which had 3.5" floppies in them.

I don't remember the manufacturer of my first CD burner either. Got it from Babbage's, which became Electronics Boutique. I remember paying $15 a pop for quality Mitsubishi DVD-R in 2002 when I first started burning those. My first IBM x86 PC was in 1992. 30 years ago this past January, actually. Back when PC's had a Turbo button on them. It had a whopping 40 MB HDD. And dual 5.25" and 3.5" floppies. I was also one of the first adopters of cable Internet in my area back in 2000.

For music CD's, I don't make image files. I rip the tracks as FLAC. Spoken word CD's are a bit different as if you rip them to containers and make new Audio CD's from those, you run the risk of added "skips" between audio tracks as the creation is seamless on the pressed discs, but not when you create the containers and add them. And this is with the 2 second pause between tracks disabled. Plus, for spoken word CD's, I generally make DVD Video out of them. Yes, you can make DVD Video out of Audio CD contents. It's convenient because if you have, say, a 5 disc book on CD set, you can make an archive that spans only 1 DVD+R DL. I've gotten up to 11 discs on one DVD+R DL before. Saves space storing archives. However, that requires ripping all CD tracks to one contiguous container file. Or multiple files for, say, tracks that make up individual chapters. That was the situation I encountered 2/3 weeks ago. A BBC radio play on 3 Audio CD's I saved space on by converting it to 1 DVD+R DL.

And I thought I was an early adopter of CD-R getting my first burner in 2000.

Under Settings on the Read page of the software interface, there are 2 Read Speed options. Change them to something slower. Audio CD can be a real pain. I had a disc just 2 or 3 weeks ago where reading to image was fine, but it didn't read it correctly. When I used Free Audio Converter to extract the tracks, it failed a hash check because it was reading too fast. So, I slowed down the read in ImgBurn to get an image that read correctly at the slowest possible speed. Then, I mounted that image as a virtual drive for FreeAC to extract from. Just be sure to change the read speed settings back, unless you want the slowest possible read speed on all operations.

The problem is most likely the CMC Magnetics cheap discs. There is only one good quality manufacturer of DVD+R DL. That's Mitsubishi. CMC makes the worst out there. You'll probably find better success switching to Verbatim DataLife Plus (NOT Life Series, as those are CMC.) DVD+R DL. Those are MCC, which are Mitsubishi. This would also explain why you got failures on both ImgBurn and other attempts to burn to the same discs in 2 different drives. But, if you do have an image file that fits on a single layer DVD, might as well use those. They're cheaper and adding a 2nd layer does increase the likelihood of issues.

If you get the same read errors in Alcohol at the same places, then you can safely rule that it's how the games in Phantasmagoria were pressed. And since you seem to get similar spots on other Playstation games, it's probably as I mentioned earlier the nature of the beast when dealing with PS archives.

Given how it's the same results regardless of what drive you use, the hardware interface, or PC, and that it happens on more than 1 of these discs in the same game set, it's probably down to how this game set was authored. Also given how it happens at the 99% mark, it's probably in either the "copy protection" area or audio channel data. Have you tried any other game discs besides the ones from Phantasmagoria? Sometimes Playstation games just exhibit odd behavior. I just over the weekend encountered odd behavior reading PS games on the LG WH16NS60. They start out at a really fast read rate, but then drop to 2x, resulting in like 20 minute read times. It happened on all 5 PS games I tried and did not happen on any other CD read operations I tested afterwards. So, it's something unique to PS games in my NS60 it seems. And there are some PS games that cannot be read in by ImgBurn on certain hardware. For instance, Mega Man 8 in my collection is one of those and it failed to read for another user who posted on here about attempting to archive the same game. Those require Alcohol 120% to read. You could try downloading the free version of Alcohol 120% and see if you get reads that way. I would guess you would since ImgBurn did not technically "fail" to read the Phantasmagoria discs.

Are the 4 different drives all from the same model/manufacturer or different models and manufacturers? Are they all internal SATA or USB? If you did try 4 different makes and models of drives, it's probably the nature of the beast of Playstation discs. Playstation discs are often very picky to make archives of. As long as the image completes, I wouldn't be too concerned. If the discs play fine, again, I wouldn't be that concerned. It seems whatever this repositioning is, it was temporary and was recovered from as it wasn't a fatal error.

Unfortunately, I know next next to nothing about PIE, PIF, jitter scans etc. as I never employ them. In fact, I don't think I've ever done a single one. As long as burn and verify completed, I've been relatively satisfied with the results. I recently made a post here on my long term results of various MID burns to discs; mostly DVD-R's. Except for the obvious culprits of CMC, VANGUARD, or other no name brands, only a handful of discs weren't fully readable after almost 20 years. And those that were failures may not have actually been real failures. As I later discovered, the WH16NS60 sometimes fails to read some discs that other drives don't have an issue reading. Came across a pressed disc just last week where that happened. My Pioneer BD read it, but the NS60 wouldn't.

I wouldn't think any drive actually has to "learn" media it's never written to before. Because the drive itself cannot store such data as only the firmware portion contains any writable memory, I'd think. I would try lowering the speed and using a 2nd disc to see if there's any more initial "bursts" like you encountered. I'd be a bit wary of a burned disc that has a slow reading portion on it at any point.

Yeah, no one packages optical discs well enough for shipping. The cake stacks are almost always damaged in transit from Amazon.com. That's why I save the cake stacks whenever they arrive undamaged. After I'm done with the discs, I have cake stacks to swap in for ones that arrived damaged. However, I've been doing that for years, so I have older ones, since hardly any of the new ones arrive undamaged. So, looks like I was right in that those pearl white ones were thermal label discs. That just means you need a special printer to print labels on the surface. I don't know much about them. I don't know if thermal printers ever took off or if they still make them anymore. I get my discs as inkjet printable, even though I don't have an inkjet capable printer for printing on the label surface. However, they are good enough for using CD markers on to write to. And, if I ever get an inkjet capable CD label printer, I can write labels to them in the future.

Well, near as I can tell, AZO dye is not metallic. Only BD-R has metal oxide in it. The nature of recordable CD and DVD is they use organic dye, which decay faster than metal oxides. But, I don't know that for sure.

The DVD-R I was using that stopped working on 1.02 and then resumed on 1.03 were 16x certified. I am guessing, though I don't remember for sure, the DVD+R were as well. I rarely use DVD+R. I only tried them out when the DVD-R stopped working to see if they might be a viable substitute. Those "pearl white" ones sound like thermal printable label surfaces, though I don't know that for sure.

You probably don't need CD-R's and can use DVD-/+R or BD-R. The only time you'd need CD-R/RW is for Audio CD's, which I highly doubt these medical records discs are. With that said, you could either create disc images and burn those images to whatever media you want or use Build mode to copy the contents. However, this may miss hidden files and folders that may be on the disc, so I'd recommend reading the discs to image files and then burning those images. You could use two optical drives to copy on the fly, but I don't recommend it. You could use File Explorer, but, as I said, if there are hidden files or folders, you may miss those. You're better off reading to image files first. Particularly with copying on the fly, if it fails at any point, you have to start all over again. If you read to disc image files first, you'll use a little extra time, but if there's a problem, it saves time in the long run. And I prefer investing a little extra time to make sure. To copy the discs to image files and then burn them to recordable discs, here's the Guide (It actually links to 2 separate Guides.):

1.02 firmware was working with Verbatim DataLife Plus DVD-R and DVD+R and then stopped working on 1.02. After more than 1 batch of each was tested, the most logical conclusion was Verbatim changed the manufacturing process so they no longer worked on 1.02 firmware. I told LG they needed to update the firmware. After 1.03 came out, Verbatim DVD-R (Didn't check DVD+R.) resumed working fine. I temporarily switched to TY DVD-R because they were still working.

I had forgotten you had older drives, which means the firmware is probably older and might not have any faster than highest rated speeds burning. But, that could be a benefit as older drives might have had more time to work out the kinks. If they've updated the firmware consistently over a longer period of time. However, with older drives with older firmware, you do run the risk that more modern media may be incompatible. The modern media may have had necessary manufacturing process changes only addressed in newer firmware. I do know that Verbatim changed the process for its DataLife Plus DVD-R and DVD+R so that the 1.02 firmware in the WH16NS60 did not write properly to it anymore when it had worked before. 1.03 firmware fixed that.

Depending on the part of the world where they were manufactured, at least in North America, DataLife Plus Verbatim media is the MCC stuff. If you want to burn at the higher speeds, newer firmware probably will write to older 8x media at 16x. However, as you state, since your purpose is longevity of data, burning at a slower speed certainly shouldn't hurt.

I'm getting unusual behavior reading Playstation CD's. What happens is for 2 and a half minutes, they read at regular speed, then drop to 2x and stay at 2x, save for an initial burst of speed with 1 minute remaining before dropping back again to 2x, resulting in 20 minute image file creation on large discs. It's done this on more than 5 games, so it appears to do it on all. I've powered off the device, restarted the PC, and powered the device back on. Same results. I read an Audio CD image I had imaged about 2 weeks ago with normal read speeds and it still read at the proper speed. I can also red Mixed Mode CD's at regular speed. I created a near full 700 MB CD of just data, burned it to CD-R, and read it back to an image file; it read at normal speed. So, this only happens on Playstation game discs. Now, I can't even recall the last time I read a Playstation game disc to an image in ImgBurn, so it's been years, probably. Maybe on the WH16NS60, this is normal behavior. Not that it will probably help, but here's a log: I 16:21:46 Source Device: [0:0:0] HL-DT-ST BD-RE WH16NS60 1.03 (R:) (USB 3.0) I 16:21:46 Source Media Type: CD-ROM I 16:21:46 Source Media Supported Read Speeds: 4x, 8x, 10x, 16x, 24x, 32x, 40x, 48x I 16:21:46 Source Media Supported Write Speeds: 48x I 16:21:46 Source Media Sectors: 107,944 I 16:21:46 Source Media Size: 253,884,288 bytes I 16:21:46 Source Media File System(s): ISO9660 I 16:21:46 Read Speed (Data/Audio): 56x / 56x I 16:21:46 Destination Free Space: 765,896,953,856 Bytes (747,946,244.00 KiB) (730,416.25 MiB) (713.30 GiB) I 16:21:46 Destination File System: NTFS I 16:21:46 File Splitting: Auto I 16:21:55 Read Speed - Effective: 48x I 16:21:56 Reading Session 1 of 1... (2 Tracks, LBA: 0 - 107943) I 16:21:56 Reading Track 1 of 2... (MODE2/FORM1/2352, LBA: 0 - 94293) I 16:32:06 Reading Track 2 of 2... (AUDIO/2352, LBA: 94294 - 107943) I 16:32:20 Exporting Graph Data... I 16:32:20 Export Successfully Completed! I 16:32:20 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:10:28 I 16:32:20 Average Read Rate: 394 KiB/s (2.3x) - Maximum Read Rate: 5,444 KiB/s (31.6x) Thanks!

You can also make a cursory evaluation without having to do a burn quality test. You can load a disc in ImgBurn and check the MID there. If it says CMC, you know right away to return them. That's what I did with the Life Series DVD at Office Depot. I bought some before I knew Life Series was all CMC from Verbatim and checked the MID in ImgBurn upon opening the package. Once I saw they were CMC, I took them right back ASAP.

As long as you get the AZO or DataLife Plus DVD+R from Verbatim, they should be fine. Not the Life Series, which will be CMC.

If you're going for long term storage, you'll want M-Disc. They cost more, but they last far longer than organic dye discs do. Organic dye discs decay much faster. M-Disc is akin to chipping pits in stone in terms of writing bits of data. As long as your device supports reading DVD+R DVD discs, it will most likely read M-Disc DVD's. And, of course, you will need a burner that supports writing to M-Disc.