Is this burn okay ? Graph inside

[BlizzardUK]

Just fitted replacement equipment in my Bravo SE as it wasn't working before, just checking if you think this graph is okay for a DVD burn at 16x and verify (via USB 2). Thanks 

[Dawn_fan]

It looks good to me. No weird drops in drive speed and a smooth curve so yes, it looks good for now. 

We could get a better idea of the quality of a burn with a scan of the disc using either DVDInfoPro, nero disc speed, or KProbe with a LiteOn drive. 

Feel free to provide a scan if you can, and we can check it out.  

[ThaCrip]

You basically need a burner that can do decent scans with stuff like KProbe to give you a pretty good ball park figure on overall burn quality. for example here is a scan of a random disc I had (see attached picture which is quality media (Taiyo Yuden DVD-R 8x (TYG02))). as that was a disc I scanned pretty much 10 years after initial burn and it still looks good. the 'blue' is generally not as important as the 'red' ones. but from what I heard over the years anything around a single 3 spike or so or less is considered pretty great burn quality and you can see here that nothing is higher than 2. even the 'blue' stuff in my scan here is pretty strong overall. I forgot the exact spec on the blue ones but I want to say up-to about 280 (the lower the better) would be within spec.

a while ago I got some DVD discs which did not like my burners (I returned the discs shortly after burning a small amount) and those I was getting actual disc read failure as I kept the disc scan to give me a rough reference point of when the scan becomes so bad it actually causes the burner to fail to read the data, which is the case on this scan with the high red colored spike. you can even see the 'blue' stuff looks so-so at best.

these basically give you a pretty good ball park figure on a quality burn and one that had actual read failure after burning.

but I do have some others that are sort of suspect at times even though they still technically work and are readable with no obvious problems. like one I am looking at a moment ago shows peak PI (blue color) of 674, which I am not happy with, but the PIF (red color) topped out at 9 spike (which is still much better than the scan with KProbe I posted here where I had actual read failure with a 76 spike with a fair amount in the 10-20+ range) but vast majority of the entire scan was 4-6 max. so basically if the disc has no read issues early on in the read, it's probably safe at the end the day.

but all of the DVD's I still have unburned will generally be in the ball park of the 'good' scan here (maybe some outliers that are still within half-decent burn quality range here and there though) since that batch I got where you see the bad scan here I returned and what was messed up is the one that was bad (like actual disc read failure) was normally quality discs as you can see from media code (Verbatim MCC etc).

p.s. but with that said, even without doing a KProbe disc quality scan, just copying data from the disc back to hard drive through file manager (or similar to what you did in your scan in the first post of this topic) might give you some rough indication (not as accurate as the KProbe stuff though) of whether the disc is currently so-so or not as if it slows during reading of the disc that 'may' indicate potential issues even though it still technically works. but even here, if the disc does not degrade much in 10-20 years, it might hold at it's current rate a long time. so ultimately you will have no real problems with the disc. I just prefer to have a good initial burn quality because I theorize 'if' the burned disc degrade at a slow and fairly consistent rate it will buy you that much more time before the disc fails to read in a random DVD reader/burner vs one that might already be so-so right from the start.

Edited December 6 by ThaCrip

[Dawn_fan]

On 12/5/2025 at 6:16 PM, ThaCrip said:

 I forgot the exact spec on the blue ones but I want to say up-to about 280 (the lower the better) would be within spec.

Based on this guide, it says that the best possible burns have C1 errors (for CDs) or PIEs (for DVDs) that are between 0 and 10. Your TYG02 burn seems to be close within this range to the point where it would classify as a good quality burn. 

Your MCC DVD burn on the other hand is on the lower quality side, as you pointed out with the higher PIEs being the "blue" stuff. 

Usually MCC is supposed to be better than the results you achieved. Maybe the specific drive you used preferred Taiyo Yuden over the verbatim media?

[ThaCrip]

13 hours ago, Dawn_fan said:

Your MCC DVD burn on the other hand is on the lower quality side

It was not 'lower quality' but outright read failure (i.e. I can't even copy the data from disc back to hard drive for general use), which is why I posted it.

the general point of those two KPobe scans were to give people around here a rough estimate as to the difference of 'quality' (and thereabouts) vs 'outright failure' (or thereabouts). I just can't say at which point is specific failure, but given that scan it's probably the '76' red spike. if not just that, then the rest are around 25-30 or so tops and even if that technically does read it, I would not be feeling good on that one at all.

but in regards to those TYG02 are discs I bought a long time ago (likely when I got my first DVD burner which means 2005 at the oldest. but probably there or maybe a year or two after when I got the TYG02 discs, so call it about 2005-2007) as I still have a large portion of those un-burned (since at this point I pretty much use them for limited higher importance data backup).

the MCC on the other hand, were bought back in I think 2022 (as I mentioned I only burned a small amount before returning them as basically defective) and pretty much all others of similar type (DVD-R or +R of same MCC Verbatim variations) I had in the past, of which I still have plenty of those, still burn well (or not too far from those standards) the last I checked as on the 100-pack shows a date of Jan 2014. so I suspect quality of discs has varied, or maybe I got a bad batch(?), or maybe they tweaked the dye a bit since and my burners don't particularly like the newer ones(?). but burn the ones I have from Jan 2014 quite well the last I checked and I had the same DVD burners for quite sometime... Liteon 1673S from 2005, Sony Optiarc 7240s from I think 2009, and most recently Liteon iHAS-324B from I think 2011.

in fact, taking a quick look through some of my older scans of MMC, which are the 'older' stuff I bought probably over a decade ago now, show quality scans of say 'MCC004' (i.e. Verbatim DVD+R 16x rated) with PIE max of 19, so quite good here, and on the PIF's, which are more important, are 2 MAX and a grand total of only 639 PIF's total on the entire disc as that scan was Oct 2017.

I also saw Verbatim DVD-R with a media code of MCC03RG20 and that was scanned April 2022 (disc originally burned Sep 2010 which means it had to be either burned on my Liteon 1673S or Sony Optiarc 7240s) with a max PIE peak of 38, so not 'perfect' but not far from it, and more importantly the PIF's are very low as while it had a peak of '3' single spike (damn near all of the rest were '1' lacking a small amount of '2'), the total disc was only 239 total, so pretty great here.

I even have some 'old' stock I bought on Ebay roughly a handful of years ago (I would have to check to say for sure but this is likely close) that are the older Verbatim DVD+R 8x 'MCC_003' and the burn quality of those varies, but is generally anywhere from okay-ish (some I might be a bit concerned with) but most are good and some in that great range as in that 10 or so PIE ball park etc. or another way to put it... out of the nearly 50 scanned 'MCC_003' discs only about 5 or so tops I might have some level of concern with burn quality (but even these, assuming they hold at their current rate and don't degrade much as time passes, could easily still be readable a long time from now). so about 10%. but even these, using that disc scan above that I already posted as a rough estimate of actual disc read failure, pretty much all or maybe all besides about one of them, look 'good enough' one could say, which takes that 10% back to about 2%.

but the 0-10 stuff in blue you mentioned (and assuming low PIF's etc like I was roughly saying)... that's more of that nit-picking 'best of the best' quality range, which I generally don't worry about too much since the first scan I posted is far closer to 'perfect' than 'failure'. but I have seen some scans in that 10-ish range though on other sites over the years, which are great, but like I say, I don't even worry about getting close to that range in general since it's pretty much overkill burn quality.

so in short, besides that bad batch from 2022 I sent back, overall I am anywhere from good enough to great-ish burn quality.

Edited 1 hour ago by ThaCrip