DVD Disk Verification Issue

[Lucas Fazzary]

1. Do You mean Duplicate (DVD-R’s) or Replicate (pressed DVD)?
2. What errors are the getting? “Not passing verification” doesn’t really explain much.
3. What are they using for verification?

-Luke

[Kathie Brown]

I mean duplicate DVD-R’s. The duplicator was getting the verification error on an LED readout on the front of his Plextor 800A drives. He also looked at the written side of the disk and said the band of data looked too thin. I thought verification usually compares the original file to the file written on a DVD at the time of writing. When a disk is verified without that original file to refer to, I assume it is looking for errors. But it seemed to check out fine at our facility and play fine–but then he got the verification error. He thinks our Pioneer DVD drive is failing. But if it is burnings DVDs that appear to play fine, how do we troubleshoot? Thanks for any help, Kathie

[Lucas Fazzary]

Hmm, our duplicators are setup to copy the original to hard drive and then burn and verify from that. I didn’t think the LED on the drive itself would show any sort of verification error, but I could be wrong. The duplicators software should be setup to verify 100% and during that stage the error should be more precise.

Have you tried burning the master using a different drive? We have about 15 plextor drives and a few of them cannot burn anymore. They produce a dark circular band on the bottom of the DVD-R which is full of unreadable sectors and thus cannot verify. However they all will play fine on our settop DVD players. Still NOT good though.

Oh and they have to verify from the original master/image. If they don’t there is no verification.

As far as the burn area on the bottom of the DVD is concerned, I think that has to do with how different drives write the lead-in and lead-out as well as the padding packs. I have made copies before and the burn area is half the size of the original yet it verifies fine within our Eclipse premastering system (which does a bit-to-bit comparison.

First thing I would do is burn a new master with a different drive. Other than that see if they will accept an image file and they can produce the copies from that or at least create a new master for you. That way you can send the image on a hard drive or FTP. this eliminates any sort of problem you will have in the burning process.

Oh also you can also download a program called “Beyond Compare” it does a great job at comparing files from one source to another. That way you can see if some of the information is being changed before you send to your dupehouse.

I hope this helps.

-Luke

[Kathie Brown]

Thank you for all of the helpful information. We DID try burning 4 new DVDs for dupe masters to help resolve this verification problem. Out of 3 DVDs re-burned on our Pioneer drive, only one was verified by the duplicator’s system. We also burned another DVD on a Samsung drive we have and that was also verified. Perhaps our Pioneer drive is having an intermittent problem similar problem to yours where a drive burns a playable DVD that is not verified. Do you recommend the Plextor drives? our duplicator likes his Plextor 800A drives. Thanks much, Kathie

[Lucas Fazzary]

Yeah I think you are having drive issues.

I definitely think Plextor is the way to go. Thats all we use to burn masters and for our duplicators. They are a little pricey but worth it. But like all drives out there if they get used enough they can go bad.