Is it my drive? Can't rip disc created in Windows 7 Media Center (recorded TV)

[Ichinisan]

My mother keeps burning episodes of Glenn Beck to DVD using Windows 7 Media Center. However, her TV tuner is a standard-def analog NTSC tuner. It bothers me that she expects to share these horrible-looking recordings with people, so I set up my own system to record the show. My cable company happens to offer a whole lot of cable channels in unencrypted ClearQAM HD, so I can record the show in high definition / digital.

 

My PC has an LG HL-DT-ST BD-RE GBW-H20L (DVD writer, BD burner). It was cross-flashed to turn it into a GGW-H20L and enable reading of HD-DVD (it works!). Cross-flashing also allowed me to disable riplock so I can create images of DVD-ROM and BD-ROM discs without unreasonable speed restrictions. The drive never gives me any trouble reading. I've burned a few BD's on it. However, when I use the built-in burning function of Windows Media Center to convert / burn a TV show, it takes about 4-5 HOURS! I haven't thoroughly tested, but I don't believe I've had any problems playing discs that were burned on this system. It's not clear if the system is hanging while burning. I always assumed there's something wrong that makes the transcoding process take forever...but I never see any background process with significant CPU usage. Specs:

 

HP Pavilion Elite m9300t CTO

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600

-upgraded NVIDIA GeForce 9300 to PNY NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT EE 1GB ("Energy Efficient")

-cross-flashed GBW-H20L drive to GGW-H20L and disabled riplock

-Added Bluetooth 2.0

-upgraded 3GB DDR2 RAM to 4GB DDR2 RAM (dual-channel)

-upgraded Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate

-replaced tuner with 2x Hauppauge HVR-2250

 

Because that system will be busy burning an episode for the next 4 hours, I needed to make a copy of another disc. I put it into my performance PC, which has a Samsung 22x drive (TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223F SB00). I can't upgrade the firmware on the drive because the upgrade utility says I don't have a supported drive (probably doesn't like a 64-bit OS). IMGburn will not finish ripping the disc. After a minute or so, it slows to 0.0x-0.3x and keeps re-trying sectors over and over (check out the attached picture). I tested playing in Windows Media Player and skipped around a bit, and there didn't seem to be a problem.

 

I can't conclude whether the problem is with the drive that burned it, or the drive that's trying to read it.

 

[edit]

Nevermind. I looked at the disc and it has some kind of permanent smudges. I always handle these correctly, so I think it would have happened while my mother was handling it.

Edited May 30, 2010 by Ichinisan

[mmalves]

I think you have an Intel chipset in your system so you need to install this (reboot if asked) and this (also reboot if asked) in order to be able to update the firmware on your Samsung burner.

 

As for that disc, it looks like it was a bad burn and you'll have to try reading it with other drives.

[Ichinisan]

I think you have an Intel chipset in your system so you need to install this (reboot if asked) and this (also reboot if asked) in order to be able to update the firmware on your Samsung burner.

 

As for that disc, it looks like it was a bad burn and you'll have to try reading it with other drives.

Thanks, but I did go straight to the Intel site to get the latest chipset software when I built this performance system about a month ago.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Is it not possible there could be a newer version in that time?!

 

Anyway, it's not just the chipset software you need, it's the 'Intel Rapid Storage Technology' driver too.

 

Updates often unblock certain commands which in turn enable stuff like firmware updates, booktyping etc to work.

[Ichinisan]

Is it not possible there could be a newer version in that time?!

 

Anyway, it's not just the chipset software you need, it's the 'Intel Rapid Storage Technology' driver too.

 

Updates often unblock certain commands which in turn enable stuff like firmware updates, booktyping etc to work.

Thanks. I found out that the disc was all smudged because someone else had handled it. I was able to rip it just fine after cleaning the disc.

 

Regarding the Intel RST driver...

 

It seems to take just as long (more than 3 hours) to burn an hour-long show on my "performance" system (Core i7 860 CPU, GTX280 GPU, 4GB DDR3 RAM, ...), which DEFINITELY has Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver installed. However, I've always been concerned that something is wrong with the RST driver. Whenever I reboot the system, the icon shows a yellow punctuation symbol (don't remember if it's an exclamation point or a question mark). When I hover my mouse over it, the pop-up message says the service isn't running. I've tried waiting several minutes to see if it would go away on its own, but it only seems to update when I double-click on it to open the interface. After several seconds, the tray icon changes and the interface appears showing the status of each SATA connector. I downloaded the latest software directly from the Intel web site only about a month ago after a fresh install of Win7 64-bit.