Cheap Media Works for Me
[QUOTE=jbejm;36631]I always used a cheap media DVD's which worked. but after servo month the DVD will not play any more even they where in the DVD book holder and away from any sun or heat.
[/QUOTE]Not trying to start a fight or say this is wrong - just sharing a different experience.
I have been buying my DVD+R and DVD-R blanks by price for years. The VAST MAJORITY of them have ALL worked wonderfully for me. I probably do not get more than two or three coasters per 100 for both +R and -R DVD5, no matter what brand. DVD9 are a completely different story, however. I find that technology very unreliable, and some brands have produced many many coasters. I also find that the DVD9s take such high power to burn that the lasers start failing after a couple of hundred max. I do not have that problem if I stick to DVD5s.
BTW - what I have found over and over again with the burners and DVD9 discs is that when the laser begins getting weak, they still record just fine, but on playback, seek times get slow and the picture begins to show breaks and macroblocking towards the outer edge of the discs. This has been true for at least five different burners that I have worn out, and the problem goes away with a new burner and the same blanks. for this reason, I have learned to take every disc I create and carefully check every chapter all the way to the end of the disc on a standalone player before I call it good and put it in the library.
I have well over 5,000 DVDs burned over the past six or seven years. The first couple of thousand were burned with standalone DVD recorders, and now all of them are being created on my computers with either DVDFab, Total Media Extreme, or VideoReDo.
All of my discs are stored in disc binders or mechanical carousels, and I do go back to them a lot, even the very oldest ones. A year or two ago I previewed every program on all the first 2,000 discs to compare how bad the PQ was with the older recording technology and determine which of them I might want to replace with newer HD versions. So far, I have not found a single disc from my library that has failed from sitting! That does not prove that there may not be bad ones in there somewhere, but it sure shows that it is not happening much, if at all.
Just for the record, the last 600 DVD5 I purchased were split between imation, TDK and DataRight. All purchased at Fry's on sale for between $9 and $15 per 100.
The last DVD9 I bought were Kodak DVD+R DL 25 packs, and I have had two spindles out of five that have thrown a lot of coasters (blanks from the other spindles have been working fine). Thankfully I did not have any problem returning the bad spindles to both Fry's and Walmart.
