TSSTcorp CDDVD SH-S202J SB03 won't read disc

[dbminter]

USB enclosures have their own power supplies.  Internally, there's a power cable to connect to the drive.

 

Why crack open the case to add a card when connecting by USB is so much easier?  And with USB 3.0, you've got enough speed to communicate with a BD drive's need for data.

[dr_ml422]

That might be true though the Data transfer from USB is not the same I think I read somewhere. It can't be faster than straight from the SATA port on the Mobo. If it was then external drives or even internal ones hooked up would be able to hit that speed, unless it's that limit you mentioned. Well since they're external heck you could swap them out whenever. Are the USB ports only on the back?

Forgot to mention that those Shiny Verbatim discs have that thermal liquid in between and so any drop just cracks it. You could see the liquid flowing. No more of those.

Edited March 19, 2019 by dr_ml422
Extra info.

[dbminter]

SATA is faster than USB 3.0.  USB 4 should close that gap.

 

There are USB ports on the front of this Dell.  However, the time I'd take swapping enclosures in and out, I'd probably not save any time I'd gain from a faster write.

 

Are you sure those are shiny surface and not silver lacquer or thermal printable ones?  I've used several shiny surface ones before but have never had a case of the surface peeling away or a fluid being underneath the surface.  I've never used silver lacquer or thermal printable ones so I wonder if those are maybe the ones you had in this case?

[dr_ml422]

These are them, unless there's another.

DVD-R 4.7GB 16X VX Shiny Silver 50pk Wrap

I was surprised. When I mentioned peel it was that the liquid you see gives the appearance of being split. It just fell and most likely landed on its edge. That's either the dye used for printing or the Azo dye, more likely the former.

I forget about the enclosure. You would have to buy another one and their more expensive than the burner?

[dbminter]

Depends on the burner.  A CD/DVD one is less expensive than the enclosure.  A BD one is more expensive.

[dr_ml422]

Could these be the ones you mentioned? They're silver and actually look better than the Shiny Verbatim VX.

DVD-R 4.7GB 8X DataLifePllus Silver Inkjet Printable - 50pk Spindle

Today I enter DVD DL burning territory and so off to the guides I go. All my episodic DVDs deemed favorite will go there. DVD-RB Pro does an excellent job though some are hitting 8GB, and that's a lot of compression,encoding,transcoding.

I narrowed down what's being burned and to what more or less. I'll have to study Blu-ray more to really understand what it entails and of course get a Blu-ray burner at that time.

[dbminter]

There's no such thing as inkjet silver printable.  Inkjet and silver shiny are two different kinds of surfaces.  Since that's not a link, I can't see what you're referring to just by the name.

[dr_ml422]

Here you go:

https://www.verbatim.com/prod/optical-media/professional-optical/dvdrecordable/dvd-recordable-silver-inkjet-printable/

This straight from Verbatim store.

I've been missing out all these years with DVD+R DL. They burned lovely. My LG and external slim LITEON don't accept 2.4x speed. LG started at 4x and the LITEON at 3x. I chose 4x to be safe.

[dbminter]

Never heard of those before.  Anyway, those aren't the silver surface ones I've been describing.  They're called silver shiny.  Those you linked apparently are just inkjet printable surfaces but instead of being colored white, they're dyed silver.  WHY it should matter is beyond me.  Whatever you print to the surface will cover up the color, be it white or silver.  Although, maybe, silver would retain a finish similar to the top of a DVD blank.

 

Apparently, now they're also differentiating between silver top and silvery shiny silk screen printable.  They keep the changing the names on me so now I don't know what I used to use before.

[dr_ml422]

If you been using the Data Life Series then you probably used these:

https://www.verbatim.com/prod/optical-media/professional-optical/dvdrecordable/dvd-recordable-silver-inkjet-printable-sku-95186/

The VX Shiny are at the bottom of the barrel, and the regular silver inkjet somewhere in between. Yes they're making several similar flavors and in different packaging as well. They either come in their default Verbatim purple, orange, blue packaging or in those clear black and white packaging. So even their product ID changes because of the packaging. 

[dbminter]

No, I've never heard of those before today.  The only inkjet I've ever seen or used are white.  I still use inkjet Verbatim DataLife Plus DVD-R and DVD+R DL but they're all white label surfaces.  And when I go to the DVD+R, they're white inkjet printable DataLife Plus I have bookmarked.

[dr_ml422]

Yeah those Shiny VX Verbatim are their bottom of the barrel print series. I should of paid attention to the "great for duplication market" description. I guess there's some way of making print copies w/out a high grade printer. Those silver inkjet also come as non Data Life Plus and are the bottom of the barrel for those. Unless it's Data Life Plus I'd recommend anyone to stay away from unless you're in that distribution market.

When burning Data to the DL is it still suggested to burn at a lower speed? Or is that suggestion just for DVD material, especially VTS folders? In other words are they just that different from their DVD-5 brethren where even a 24x will yield great results and playable? Thanks.

[dbminter]

The irony about Verbatim's quality is they farm out to both MCC, the highest quality material out there, and to CMC, the lowest quality material out there.  Avoid their Life Series you'll find in brick and mortar stores as they're CMC.  Avoid their BD-RE as they're CMC.  Their BD-R and BD-RE DL are quality media.  And, of course, their media labeled DataLife Plus or AZO are quality discs.

 

Notice how CMC, CMC Magnetics, calls themselves an anagram of MCC, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, so they think they can trick some people who aren't paying attention? 

 

I've never had a problem burning DVD+R DL at the highest rated speed the drive will allow.  The conventional wisdom is burning slower will yield better discs, but, as you've seen, you got Miscompares going at a slower speed than the rated maximum on other media.  I've always just set ImgBurn to Max writing speed and let the drive/firmware/media write descriptor combo determine the speed it's written at.

[dr_ml422]

I noticed some glitches on a DVD I burned in Max, though I seriously think it was the copy and not the burn. You're right my LG at lower speeds doesn't produce good burns. It even posts 10x I think with the DL blanks. I'm having a time of it separating Titles into genres as many overlap. I think for Series DVDs I'll rename all to Film Series and put them there. I wish the program would do it for you. It justs imports it in. You have to name the genre. Other limitation is the title is limited to 16 characters. I just use date and time and write the name on the disc when I have to.

[dbminter]

Had a chance to install the trial of ConvertXToVideo.  EPIC failure creating MP4 with H264.  Creates a file with audio but no video on MP4 and H264 video!    However, I had multiple chapters in the Blu-Ray I used as input and the program did NOT create individual MP4 files for each chapter.  There's no reason why the program should create individual MP4's for each chapter.

 

I tried to recreate the file as MP4 with Mpeg4 as the video type.  Got video in my file that time.  Don't know why the H264 isn't working.  I know I've got the necessary codecs because AVIDeMux will save nVIDIA H264 video in its output that plays, so it's probably some kind of bug in the ConvertXToVideo software.

 

Ah, I think I may have discovered where your one file per chapter may be coming from.  Under the setting in ConvertXToVideo, check under Chapters.  Do you have the box checked that says Create one title set per chapter when loading a file?  If you have that checked, try unchecking it and see if that doesn't improve your file set creation.  That setting may only apply to DVD Video or BD Video creation, though, but it may fix the output behavior you've been getting.

 

I tried creating to DVD Video and it seems to work fine.  So, the H264 error would prevent me from using this software to do my DVD to container conversion.  Mpeg4 is too large an output format.  It creates 1 GB 10 minute files.  But, it does work to convert BD Video.  It does import all titles, the main feature and bonus features.

[dr_ml422]

You forgot that I mentioned this in a earlier post where they won't admit it but I don't think they want to pay the royalty fees associated with the h .26 4 encoding. You saw how the regular mpeg-4 took the video like anything correct? The only thing with that is that the file will be way larger than with the more efficient h.264. The thing about the title sets has to do with the MP4 output where if you put in a regular episodic DVD like I said it will make four five six different MP4 files out of each episode. That's just the way it does that, there's no way around that believe me. The only way around that is to merge all of the episodes together witch you can do. Even though they're separate mp4 file they'll still be merged together in one MP4 which isn't that bad if it's chapter DVD, though not great with episodes. I'll try unchecking that when I put in a DVD that has chapters in separate VOB files. That's where it'll act up when converting to mp4 etc..., It'll put each VOB file in a separate container.

Bottom line we need to have an arsenal of software that deals with the things that we do because sooner or later even the best will get trumped up with even a regular file for whatever reason. I've been messing around with AVStoDVD and it will not acknowledge dual audio files in a mp4 file and so it'll error out right at the beginning. I didn't know what was causing it until today when I realized that you only have preferences for what language you would like the audio to be in and not some default where it'll just accept whatever and separate that from the get-go. Great alternative to VSO ConvertXToDVD though. Give it a go. It's free and uses HCEnc and ffmpeg as encoders. They suggested I leave it at default settings, though it's overkill imo. The default for HCenc is 2 pass, and I didn't see any improvement from just 1 pass. HCenc is better imo than ffmpeg. VSO has an optimization where it's CBR with FFmpeg produces very nice and small DVD outputs.

I sent VSO an email regarding any future upgrade/update to that ConvertXtoVideo. Believe me the h.264 is just one issue. It also has issues with certain Pascal architecture GPU cards, which yours and mine are on the list. We both have the same GPU card, yours is the larger RAM edition. You'll notice when you use it with different containers how sometimes the optimization will go on and not go on. Don't buy ConvertXtoVideo until after they upgrade it to something other than 2.88.

[dbminter]

Actually, no, I had forgotten you had said anything about h264 output failing before with ConvertXToVideo. 

 

And if it does do that on episodic DVD's, I'd prefer it do it that way.  I'd rather have each episode as a separate container.  If you wanted to, you could take each container and use the Merge function in ConvertXToDVD to create a single title set.  Anyway, let me know if that option change does any good.  However, the software should allow the user to choose not to separate single episodes.  I can understand why it does it, though, because the IFO's would, even taken all episodes as one giant VTS on the DVD as separate title sets.

 

One thing I think I'll try.  Taking the MPEG4 output into AVIDeMux and recode it as h264.  See what I get.  Let me see if I can recover the output from before and try that now.  I was able to recover the deleted file from the old Windows where I tested ConvertXToVideo before restoring my live system image backup before testing it and another application I was trying out.  So, now, AVIDeMux is recoding the MPEG4 video to H264.  Didn't help out much.  Just down from 931 MB to 720 MB.

[dr_ml422]

That doesn't make too much sense to go through all that trouble for a backup of an episodic DVD etc... If you want to keep it as is then just use any good ripper whether the older goodies, or newer ones like Fab, and rip to the hard drive. Then your choice of DVD-DL, or DVD-RB, or if for bit quality loss transcode to DVD-5. No sense having separate mp4, then converting again back to DVD in merge. For that just keep it as mp4 and right there merge it into one mp4, though menu goes out the window. Unless you want say how many episodes as separate files on separate discs to watch separately? Best to keep them on one DVD and use Menu to watch whatever. Right there in ConvertXtoVideo you can merge and produce DVD. Better yet if you want put that episodic DVD in VidCoder and it'll produce separate MP4 as well, not sure if there's function to keep as one file. I think they implemented that, and the h.264 works.

[dbminter]

There may be some glimmer of hope that VSO is back in business.  They recently released an update (Or maybe a beta.) to VSO Downloader.  Which would indicate they may be back to coding.

[dr_ml422]

I really do hope so, as they're pretty much the most reliable outfit regarding DVD encoding, burning, creating. Especially with default settings. I never used their 2 pass or quality settings. 

I have a question. Is a layer break necessary for burning Dual Layer, or is it a precautionary measure for definite output? Reason is I let ConvertXToDVD finish off a Dual Layer project and apparently no layer break was used. Or I just didn't see it, as it's done in the background?

Does that VSO downloader even work? I never got around to playing with it and seeing what and how it works.

Why does ImgBurn say I have Windows 8, when my system says Windows 10? I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually 8 and MS downloaded it as 10. ImgBurn is very accurate. If LIGHTNING UK would like to elaborate I would definitely appreciate it. Thanks.

I'm going to build me something really future proof and updated. Everything except maybe my case and burners. Windows 10 requires updated hardware more than anything.

 

[dbminter]

Well, it depends on how you define "layer break."  There's the change between Layer 0 and Layer 1 which is absolutely necessary, but what is generally referred to as the layer break may not.  Because you can make seamless and non-seamless layer breaks.  Seamless layer breaks won't have the pause in the video when the layer changes.  Non-seamless will pause.  And it depends on the size of the VIDEO_TS.  If you have a combination of VIDEO_TS and data that makes a DVD-9, if the VIDEO_TS is small enough to fit on one layer, you won't need a layer break.  You'll only be prompted for layer breaks if the VIDEO_TS spans both layers.  I am guessing, though I never used ConvertXToDVD for actual DVD creation, just the creation of VIDEO_TS, that the software automatically uses seamless layer breaks.

 

VSO Downloader worked for the brief period I used it.  I dropped it like a hot potato because VSO lies about it being "free."  It's time crippled.  It's only free for like a week, then it stops working until you pay for it.  That's not free; that's a trial.

 

The current version of ImgBurn returns Windows 10 as Windows 8 because of how Windows identifies itself.  Since Windows 10 was released after the release of the last stable version of ImgBurn, ImgBurn identifies Windows 10 as Windows 8.  This will be fixed in the next stable release of ImgBurn when it comes out.

[dr_ml422]

If the layer break, the one ImgBurn prompts for is not really needed then why does it automatically come up? Are you saying that if the software that created the VTS folder files automatically made it seamless that ImgBurn would just burn it without asking for a layer break? Something doesn't sound right. If the file was burned by the authoring software without any further input from me, why would ImgBurn still ask for a layer break? This is what happens when DVD-RB Pro is set to burn as a DVD DL, if I'm not present it will not finish the job. I think ImgBurn is playing safe as the firmware will acknowledge the DL blank and burn it accordingly. 

I think you meant how ImgBurn identifies because my OS is Windows 10. 

I still don't know why software developers stay hung up on older OS and just don't concentrate on making their software the best for the current OS? Let the consumer, customer, user, upgrade. I'm glad MS woke up and started doing just that. It's difficult enough to keep current with everything involved with the current, and still want to placate those stuck on XP for example. I think this is why many freeware are not that consistent, especially Video software. I also believe it hinders one from playing with the advanced newer stuff. Hence stuck on h.264 etc... when h.265 HEVC and 4K is here. No wonder a particular software I use to me is lacking. It's me. They're into the future. I'm still fussing with the more known and so familiar. I still have no real clue as to Blu-ray structure etc... Imagine ultra 4k is here.

On that note, I installed DVD Flick and it seems to be up to date. AVStoDVD works when it wants to. When it does it's great! When it doesn't you wasted 3 freaking hours so it can err out! This is why VSO is very good at what it does.

[dbminter]

I'm sorry.  I didn't word myself very well.  I mean layer breaks aren't necessary for DVD+R DL if the VIDEO_TS fits on one layer but adding extra data files to the job makes it fit on a DVD+R DL.  Layer breaks are necessary but you don't have to assign them for DVD-R DL, I think.  However, who really uses THAT format, anyway?    So, I don't think layer breaks are user defined for DVD-R DL because the layer change is always at a specific part on the media.  I don't know that for certain, as it's been over a decade since I created a DVD Video on DVD-R DL.

 

I know far more about VIDEO_TS structure than I do about BD Video.  In fact, without actually looking at a BD Video disc structure, I can't name, from memory, the name of the folder the video is actually contained in in BD Video.

[dr_ml422]

Ok. When burning to DVD+DL with a whole VTS folder taking up space, is imgburn the only software that asks for a layer break all the time? If so is it precautionary to make sure you get a proper burn? I explained before that I let the VSO ConvertXToDVD do everything and it did it without asking for any layer break. Also I ask because whenever I had to burn to DL with DVD-RB Pro set up for ImgBurn, If I'm not present it will not burn it because I need to provide the layer break info. Is this an ImgBurn default function? I'm going to burn a copy of an iso I made with ImgBurn with something else and see if it asks for a layer break.

[dbminter]

I've never used anything else but ImgBurn.  I think I might have used ConvertXToDVD's feature just to test it out, but I've always preferred having the options to set myself.  So, since it's the only software I've used, it's the only thing I know that does ask for layer break information.    It's there to give the user the option to set the layer change at different points where allowed.  ConvertXToDVD is just setting it wherever it wants to place it.  It thinks the user probably doesn't want to be bothered with that kind of information.  Anyway, the bottom line is, yes, when the VIDEO_TS spans both layers, a layer break/change is required.  ImgBurn just gives the user the opportunity to set it where they want.  For instance, I like placing layer breaks at the beginning of a movie/episode where possible.  Where not, I try to select something like a period of solid black between a scene/commercial break slot.