Wombler

That I can well believe. His band came on stage first and jammed, doing their own thing for quite a while before James came out and they were amazing to say the least. There was a huge saxophonist guy that particularly stands out in my memory as he was really letting it rip with some fantastic screaming sax. A lot of the screaming sax stuff in my mind is the forerunner to metal screaming guitar. If you listen to any screaming sax solo there virtually isn't anything you can't instantly imagine being played on lead guitar. I wonder what will happen to his band now though. Nemesis

I was fortunate enough to see him perform live in 2004 at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. We'd travelled from Northern Ireland specially to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and didn't know who the support act was. I couldn't believe it when the "support act" turned out to be James Brown!! He was a fabulous performer and the guys playing with him were absolutely fantastic musicians although I suppose you'd expect that from such an iconic artiste. I genuinely enjoyed James Brown's stint as much as the Chillis who were the band I'd primarily gone to see. Awesome concert. RIP James. Nemesis

You seem to be saying you've only got a DVD ROM/CD-RW combo drive. If it's only a DVD ROM then it can't write DVDs. You'll need a DVD writer for this. Nemesis

Wow! Crassness hits new levels. Astonishing! I did watch it though to find out. Nemesis

No worries! Nemesis

It'll depend on line conditions and distance from the exchange as to what speeds you get. Some users will be no better off than with ADSL on the other hand if you're right on top of the exchange you might get the full 24Mb/s. ADSL2+ is currently being trialled here in the UK although a few ISPs have installed their own equipment at exchanges and are offering limited coverage. Check out this link for some techie info (connection speed forecasts etc) for the UK implementation of ADSL2+ compared to Max ADSL. http://www.farina1.com/bookmark/000004/200...27/00020260.HTM Nemesis

Cheers guys, I hadn't heard of that one. Shamus: You've preempted my next question before I'd even asked it! Nemesis

For the benefit of the uninitiated (or the hard of thinking such as myself ) what does PTP/OTP stand for? Nemesis

Actually I really like PowerDVD but I suppose everyone has their own particular favourites. The Eagle Eye video enhancement makes a dramatic difference and I like the way it can easily toggle the dynamic display of titlesets, chapter points and other information. I suppose it depends on what you're using it for though as to which you prefer. Nemesis

Yeah I think you're probably right but it was the fact that it needed a patch to support XP that rang the alarm bells with me. This automatically suggests that there may be compatibility problems with XP that have since been rectified. If it works with the new version then well and good. If it doesn't then we'll continue diagnosis from there. Nemesis

No problem. It may or may not be the answer to your problem though. Nemesis

The current version of PowerDVD is 6.0. 3.0 is way way out of date. Perhaps that's part of your problem. Download the latest trial version and see if it works. http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_1_ENU.html Nemesis

Heh heh heh..... Nice one! Nemesis

That's great LUK!, thanks. I'd been waiting for the bitsetting version of the firmware before upgrading to 1.08 so I've only just done this myself. The NEC's are indeed weird. They produce exceptionally high quality burns at 8x but as we've discussed before if you burn at 16x you get a PIE spike at 2.2Gb. If you burn at 12x with certain media you get a spike at 3.8Gb. These are normally not critical with regard to playback (except with borderline incompatible media) but in my mind are are certainly undesirable. I think I'll stick to the 8x discs at the moment although I might upgrade to the ND-4570A when the firmware has matured. BTW the PIE spikes coincide with the relinking points on the disc. The recent NEC drives monitor the write strategy across the entire disc and can alter strategies at various fixed points during the burn. This works extremely well with the slower speed discs hence the very high quality lower speed burns as each section of the disc is burnt with the optimum strategy. They haven't totally got their act together yet for the fastest burns though. Thanks again though. Very useful. Nemesis

Sorry to pester you but you haven't forgotten about this by any chance have you? If it's too much hassle don't worry. Nemesis

Thanks a million, much appreciated. Instead of changing from my current discs to the TYG02s I might change to the TYG03s if the 12x burns are anywhere near as good as the TYG02s. Nemesis

Another superb result. LFC I see you did the recent NEC ND-4500A test burns for the TYG03 discs. Would there be any possibility of adding in the results from a 12x burn? Nemesis

That's a superb scan. I'm thinking of changing to these discs when my current batch runs out. They're a bit dearer but the results are undeniably good. Nemesis

Yes it's done after the burn but it's much more useful than a verify. The scan measures and quantifies correctable errors (as well as uncorrectable errors) across the entire disc. The upshot of which is that you are able to assess the quality of the burn and not just whether the disc is readable or not. It's the recommended method of assessing compatibility of particular media with your particular drive. Check out the 'drives and media' section for examples of scans with different media and drives. Nemesis

It's great though that some people take the trouble to do these things as it benefits other not so well organised users such as myself. Nemesis

I haven't actually bothered with DL yet but you're right. Verbatim are widely regarded as the best DL discs currently available. At the moment, as far as DL goes, there's Verbatim and then there's all the rest. Still too dear though for a cheapskate like me. Nemesis

Excellent, I'll be very interested to see that! Nemesis

That?s a fairly sweeping statement. The quality of the G05s on this side of the big pond has remained consistant for quite a while now. No verification problems and no disk rot after a year or so making them perfectly usable in any capacity. They might only be 12x but they?re all I use these days because I know exactly what I?m getting. The inability of some drives to read and/or write to this particular media isn?t necessarily the fault of the media itself. FWIW, both of my Pioneer 109s recognise the media as 12x. My Lite-On and LG drives identify them as 8x. Houston, we have a problem. Sorry, I should have made myself a bit clearer. I may have caused some confusion. It wasn't intended as a sweeping statement and I'm not tarring all G05s with the same brush. I was merely contrasting this with the TY discs which seem to have an untarnished reputation so far. The Ritek Extremes referred to earlier in the thread are probably at the top of the heap for quality control but other G05 discs have been known to suffer from inconsistent production runs or bad batches if you like. With regard to the longevity issues it's not disc rot I'm referring to (which affects pressed DVDs) but the degradation curve of the dye-type. I've read that with G05s scans taken say six months, a year, two years later etc etc after burning show a higher degree of increase in PIE and PIF errors than other dye-types. The problem with checking this is that you need to have the original scans to compare with. Most people never bother keeping them, others do though and I've no reason to doubt that the scans they've posted are honest. As you rightly say however this might only relate to US discs but all I'm saying is that in my own mind that raises some cause for potential doubts. It would actually be quite interesting as a one off exercise for the mods to retain the test burns and try them again in six months. Whether it's worth the effort or not though is open to debate. If you're interested check out the following thread at CD Freaks. http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=161134 I can't remember where I saw the comparative scans but it's either on CD Freaks or VideoHelp.com. I'm not skewing this or attempting to put a bias against any particular type of media I'm just making people aware of what the Internet community at large has already put out there. I just picked the link above as the first result Google came up with but there are stacks more if you do a search. Nemesis

Again, early indications are that this is one of the areas that NEC have improved. Not totally critical I know but nonetheless desirable. Here's a link to a pre-review assessment of this drive if anyone's interested. http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/259/1 Nemesis

Check out the drives and media section as Cornholio suggests as this is a valuable and most useful guide. For the drives they test you'll not find anything anywhere near as comprehesive anywhere else. There are a few new models out though and if you like the look of the NEC drives then go for the ND-4570A which has only recently been released. Early word on this drive is excellent and it seems that NEC have managed to improve their write strategies even further. Nemesis