blask

Thank you.

Hi, what country of origin is stated on the label? It's not visible in the picture.

pcgamingwiki.com is a good site to check what kind of DRM certain PC game has. It says that the retail version of The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring has SecuROM DRM and Codename: Panzers - Phase One has Starforce DRM, so that explains the problem.

Well I own a Verbatim external USB Blu Ray burner and it's actually a Pioneer drive. I'm pretty sure they are still being sold.

Yes, that's true. I was talking about external DVD burners, not BD.

I've tested several external drives, and the results show that different Lite-on models are better than other brands for burning CDRs and so far the best for burning DVDs is Transcend TS8XDVDS-W/K (The last letter W or K indicates the color of the drive white or black) TS8XDVDS is also the only one manufactured in Taiwan instead of China, from what I have seen so far.

CMCMAG-BA5-000 disks are junk, but I doubt that's the reason for the standalone player reading problem. I've burned dozens of them with data and with BD-video contents with the same type of Pioneer device and generally they work fine on 4 different standalone players - Sony, Samsung, Philips and Panasonic. (In case you wonder the reason why I use them is that in Eastern Europe, or at least in my part of EU, there is no real choice, even Verbatim branded BD25 discs are actually CMC, there are no DataLifePlus single layer BD-Rs, and ordering them from another country or from another continent will make their price way too high for me.) I would blame DVDfab for the problem with reading disc on standalone player.

Bit late to this thread, sorry. The only way to burn DVDs at speed lower than 8x nowadays is to use an external slim burner. Yes, I know the rule is that external drives are worse than the internal ones and the slim ones are even worse. But in my own experience in the last several years the quality of the new internal drives has declined rapidly, probably due to manufacturers cost savings. At least where I live - south-eastern part of EU - right now there are only 3 internal models available - LiteOn, LG and the aforementioned Asus drw-24f1mt. I own the Lg and the Asus and they both look and feel very cheap (and they are cheap - 15 and 24 EUR respectively). Both are not great in burning DVDs, although Asus performs better, but again both are very far from the quality of the burners produced let's say 15 years ago. But the burner that gives even better results is an external Transcend slim drive. Probably because it can write at 4x. Anyways, sorry for the offtopic, just wanted to share my experience.