Is DVD burning a waste of time?

[Hurricane Andrew]

Man. I must be doing something wrong. In 4+ years of burning CD's and DVD's, I've yet to come across a bad media. And I use cheap stuff. I mean cheap. I haven't paid for a blank CD-R in years. I got all of 'em free after rebate from Staples, Office Max, Buy.com, etc. As for DVD's, I haven't been able to get any for free yet, but I haven't paid over 20 cents a disc either. Value Disc, Optimium, you name it, I've burned it and it works. It's really not rocket science. For videos, DVD Decrypter and Nero Recode (or DVD Shrink) work like a charm. I still use an old version of Clone CD (before they sold out) for CD's. Never a bad burn, and I mostly play them in my car CD player or my two year old Toshiba DVD player.

My burners are a Lite-On LTR 52246S CD/RW and a Plextor 712A DVD+-RW. Hell, even my old Ricoh 7083A which was an early 8x burner never gave me any trouble. Until I have a bad experience, I'm convinced that it's all in the user, or something running in the background that causes the bad burns. Either that, or I'm the luckiest SOB in the world, and I can guarantee that ain't it...

 

[krackato]

Dig out some of those 4 year old discs and tell me how they're doing.

 

[Hurricane Andrew]

The CD's are still doing fine. Just gave my South Park Christmas album a good workout the past few weeks...

As for the longevity of the DVD's, I'll have to get back to you. The "oldest" is only a few months old.

 

[Dreadogg]

All my movies still work flawless after 3 years, maybe you should learn to burn them or stop using them as coasters!

 

[MiNkIm]

I have burned 50+ DVD's with my plextor 8x and had no coasters with dirt cheap media (runs perfect on my DVD player) , but I bought a 16x BTC and 5/10 discs #ucked up.

 

[shinotenshi]

i don't think the op was talking about coaster, but instead rot, which is common with cheap media, which tends to decay under anything but ideal conditions, due to the dye. There is no debate about this, many of these cheaps brands you refer to do use dyes which decay more rapidly than the "higher" quailty brands that use better dyes.

 

[wchou]

Cheap brand and generic scratch easy too, so just by rubbing it a little and you have just lost valuable data on it.

 

[Sunner]

Yeah, I've burned a fair number of noname CD's/DVD's, never had a problem with the burning itself, but rather, I've found their longlivety is significally worse than the good brands.
As for Verbatim, I always go for the Datalife Plus disks.

 

[Baked]

Never buy el cheapo media. Have only bought FujiFilm/TY or Memorex/Ricoh DVD+R and CDR.

 

[boran]

Plextor media is also rebranded Tayo Yuden, they're damnd expensive, but I have discs that I have burned 2 years ago and Kprobe still sais they have only 3K PI errors (dunno in how far you can trust Kprobe, but the ritek that came with my liteon clocked in at 120K, works fine tho)

 

[semo]

Originally posted by: shinotenshi
i don't think the op was talking about coaster, but instead rot, which is common with cheap media, which tends to decay under anything but ideal conditions, due to the dye. There is no debate about this, many of these cheaps brands you refer to do use dyes which decay more rapidly than the "higher" quailty brands that use better dyes.

well i have been using infiniti for more than a year now and the label side on some cds that i have burned 10 months ago has started to fall off. i also have some generic media that was burned 2 years ago which is, fine the only difference is that it was stored in a cd wallet and the infiniti ones are just stacked in a column gathering dust. cds stored properly will last longer if stored properly regardless of the brand in my experience

anyway, i can't go wrong with verbatim and tdk can i?