I admit it. I love a bargain. So when I found a media supplier last year (ESBuy.com) that was selling DVD-Rs for roughly a dollar a piece, I snapped up a box of 25. No matter that the discs carried no brand name (or any name, for that matter), or that they were purple, a color I'd never seen before in DVD media. I bought and used them.
My experience with them was pretty good; I burned hour-long videos onto nearly all 25 and had no problem playing them back on my DVD player. There were, though, a couple of warning signs I wish I'd paid closer attention to. The DVD burner in my system failed to recognize at least two of the discs. I put the questionable media aside, wondering if maybe there was an issue with my drive, then pretty much forgot about the incident.
In my effort to transfer as much of my older 8-mm analog tape collection as possible to DVD, I burned many discs without trying them in our set-top DVD player. When I did spot-check a couple of discs, all seemed fine—until "The Bar Mitzvah DVD Incident."
I'd made a DVD of a VHS tape containing some old home movies originally shot on 8-mm film and part of a 50-year-old, 8-mm color film of my father's Bar Mitzvah. Also included were some rare, moving images of my grandparents in their youth. My uncle ended up with the original DVD and asked me if I could make several copies of just the Bar Mitzvah. I'd already made copies of other DVDs and didn't see this as problem.
I use Sonic's MyDVD to burn DVDs, as I've mentioned in other columns. Sonic employs the OpenDVD standard, which adds information to the burned DVD that makes it editable in any other OpenDVD-compliant application. Because DVD-R is a write-once medium, I can't burn again to the same disc, but I can edit in memory and on my hard drive and then burn to a new disc. MyDVD makes this process pretty seamless, and the first time you hit Save when editing an existing DVD, the software automatically transfers the project, the video, and all its parts to your system. This is more or less the process I planned to use to remake the Bar Mitzvah DVD.
I put the DVD in my PC and began to edit. I selected a video chapter and then Edit video. The video loaded into ArcSoft's ShowBiz video editor (not my favorite video editing app, by the way), but stopped just short of the segment I needed. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't access the Bar Mitzvah portion of the video. This seemed odd, since I could see and even play the chapter point when I viewed the DVD in play mode. I examined the disc for scratches. There were some, but nothing significant or deep enough to impact playback. I used some disc cleaner to make sure no smudges were on the disc. I also decided to try saving the whole DVD to my hard drive and editing from there. But each attempt failed with a message saying that the program couldn't transfer the video. Eventually I got CRC errors. Things were spiraling out of control.
I no longer had access to the source video, so I couldn't easily recapture the video and start over. I decided to bring the DVD into the office to see if I would have any better luck grabbing the contents through a different system. At this point I still suspected that either my software installation was corrupt or that my home PC had a problem.
I first tried to play the DVD on my laptop's drive. It played, but each time I tried to copy the contents to my hard drive (the video is stored as MPEGs but with VBO extensions), my system froze and crashed. Eventually, I couldn't even play the DVD on the notebook without the machine hiccupping. I tried in a desktop, and the disc wouldn't play at all.
I took the DVD into the PC Magazine Labs, but it played in only one system, a machine running InterVideo's WinDVD. Attempting to copy the files onto any PC resulted in a system error. I couldn't seem to do anything with the DVD except play it on my Toshiba set-top player.
I contacted Sonic and asked them if they had any ideas. Sonic has a lab with a huge variety of DVD players and burners. The rep didn't like the sound of my problem and suggested I send the disc. Sonic would investigate and try to salvage my data. The company's tech support immediately identified the problem as a media issue. The support person tried to play back and capture the data using a number of different drives, including an HP 100i, which couldn't even load the disc. "It reported errors and ejected the disc immediately," the technician told me in an e-mail. He tried other drives—a
As for what caused the problem, Sonic told me that generic media can unexpectedly become corrupt and end up with playback issues. Write-once media spontaneously corrupting seemed hard to believe; corruption on the media that some players can somehow overlook made more sense to me, though. This wasn't the first time Sonic had tried to convince me that the kind of burnable media you select can significantly impact output quality. Still, I resisted the idea and thought this had to be an anomaly.
Fast forward a few months later to our family's yearly camping trip. We've been going with the same five families for six years, and this year I decided to bring a DVD I created that I contained footage from our first year together. Usually we use a DVD player and LCD projector to play a movie on a large white sheet for all the kids. This year, no one brought a projector, but my friend did bring her new HP notebook. It was a desktop replacement and about a month old. We had just seen a slide show of photos from the current camping trip and I brought out the DVD disc. I put it in the notebook and waited. Nothing happened. The system did not reject the disc; it did nothing. It acted as if I hadn't placed anything in it.
When I got back home, I tried the DVD in my wife's Dell Inspiron 1100. The DVD drive got the menu up and I clicked on a chapter point. The video started and then hung. I realized I had never played this DVD after burning it. I tried it in my trusty Toshiba player. I got the menu and selected a chapter point. The DVD began playing, but within a few moments was skipping and pixelating. This was another one of my ESBuy.com generic discs. There was no longer any question in my mind; the problem had to be the media.
The larger lesson here is that not all media is created alike. Sonic tried to tell me this. The company always suggested Verbatim, Sony, or Maxell. I ignored the advice. But clearly, creating optical media requires care. I've since purchased a spindle of Maxell discs from ESBuy.com (they still have some of the best media prices on the Web), and I have a stash of Verbatims. Sonic also recommended that I check out Ritek and the media finder at http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdmedia.
I will now be going through my collection of DVDs discs and seeing how many I have to burn again.
And you can be sure, I won't get burned again.
More articles from Lance Ulanoff:
• Is 3D the Kiss of Death?
• What Should Be Your First iPhone App?
• This Is My Last BlackBerry
• Google+ Real Names Policy Is About Brands, Not People
• Oh, Those Crazy Swedes and Their, er, Software