[MacDV] Re: 8x DVD-R's

[Nick Scalise]

On Apr 20, 2005, at 1:39 PM, Nick Scalise wrote:

[snip]

> Maybe I'm thinking about this in a backwards way. Since I can burn at 
> 8 and my home Sony DVD player will play them, but my mother-in-laws 
> Sony SLV-D300P (and an older apple superdrive) will not play the 8x, 
> but will play 1x fine. I was under the impression that the media was 
> not "up to par".
>
> However, after reading some reviews on the Sony SLV-D300P, it seems 
> that the DVD player in that unit sucks. Folks are having issues 
> playing even commercial dvd's.
>
> So, I will take my 8x burned DVD Taiyo Yuden to my local Furniture 
> Mart and try it on as many of their display dvd players as possible. I 
> will then buy a few Maxell/TDK 8x and try those too.

OK, sorry for replying to my own post.

Anyhoo, I took my 8x TaiyoYuden (TY) to the local MegaLoMart and tried 
it on many different brands of portable DVD players and settop DVD 
players. I would say I got about 50% success rate. (I did not record my 
results on this run).

So, I bought some TDK's that were on sale at CompUSA (TDK's are also 
highly regarded at DigitalFAQ.com) and here's my results:

Portables:
Polaroid:	OK
Toshiba:		OK
Sony:		OK
Panasonic: 	No
Toshiba II:	No
Apex:		No
Coby:		No

At first I was thinking maybe some of the portables had dirty lenses, 
etc. But then I looked at the data side of the demo DVD's that were in 
there, they were very scratched and they played fine.

Settops:
Coby:		No (Played but sound was bad and video pixelated)
Sony:		OK
Zenith:		No
Toshiba:		No
JVC:		OK
Sony II:		OK
Pioneer:		OK (I believe this to be OK as the menu on the DVD player 
came up OK. It was not properly connected to a TV.
Hitachi:		No
Norcent: 	No (Played but sound was bad and video pixelated)

The TY's failed at about the same rate as the TDK's.That to me is a 
pretty horrible record.  Are you folks who have burned disks at 8x 
saying that your success rate is higher? Could it be that I have a 
defective DVD recorder?

Oh, BTW, the TY was burned at 8x using Toast from a disk image created 
from iDVD 4. The TDK had the same image burned at 8x from the Finder.

--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at mac.com