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How good are my DVD Rs? Or Error and Jitter Testing software solutions…
Another year and another step up in the amount of DVD masters we’re creating. And since I’m getting tired of blindly and haphazardly testing different drive/media combinations, I’m wondering if there’s any software (Pc or Mac) that allows me to burn a DVD, then evaluate the resultant master.
I ask because I was talking to a replicator today who mentioned they found only one out of hundreds of writer/media combination that didn’t fail their evaluation (pioneer DVR 108,109, 110 paired with TKD Lux Pro DVD 5).
It bothers me that I can’t test my equipment.
I know replicators do this sort of thing with very expensive and highly specialized drives – but I’m wondering if there’s some sort of middle ground for us content producers who are looking for the DVD Authoring equivalent of a waveform monitor and vectorscope?
A google search doesn’t seem to yield anything meaningful and a search on this forum pulls up an archive conversation from ’03 and doesn’t directly answer this question.
Any insights are much appreciated.
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Patrick Inhofer
editor, compositor, nice guy
applePi Editorial, nyc -
4 Replies
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Found this site – hopefully it will help:
https://www.osta.org/technology/dvdqa/dvdqa12.htm
You should also consider using DLT to deliver to a replicator
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Eric,
Thanks for the link.
Also, my concern isn’t replicating, but duplicating – which is becoming a much bigger part of our business. Most of our jobs fall between 5 – 500 copies and have too tight a turnaround to make replication cost-effective.
We’ve started building a little QC station using players we’ve found to be particularly finicky – but I was hoping for a more qualitative solution.
– pi
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Patrick Inhofer
editor, compositor, nice guy
applePi Editorial, nyc -
I have a older Plextor and a BenQ DW1640 burner. Both of them can read out bit error rates on DVD-R media. I did some testing and found a huge difference in error rate between Taiyo Yuden and Ritek media:
https://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/DVD/error1.htmlThe Nero CD-DVD speed test program https://www.cdspeed2000.com/ also measures error rates from drives that report them, like Lite-On and BenQ brands. Here’s a review of one such drive: https://www.cdfreaks.com/article/232/4
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Hi John,
I discovered the Plextools software late last week. Seems to be what I’m looking for and I’ve started testing out media.
I also found a site that’s dedicated to this issue: http://www.cdfreaks.com
After lots of research at cd freaks I found the following software tools to help evaluate media/burner pairings:
https://www.dvdinfopro.com/ (freeware)
https://www.k-probe.com/ (lite-on drives)
https://ww2.nero.com/enu/index.html (generic solution)
https://plextools.com/info/info.asp (plextor drives)That’s just a starting point. There is more out there. Some things to keep in mind:
The absolute numbers/readings that any of these apps output are useful in relative terms – they shouldn’t be considered absolute, accurate readings because most consumer burners just aren’t built to the tolerances required for hyper accurate readings. However, when comparing 4 different brands of media, the readings between them are what we should be judging.
Also, some of these apps are meant to be used with specific brands of drives. Others are more “generic” solutions.
And no, I haven’t found any Mac-based solutions.
So, that’s what I found this past week researching this issue. Hope others find it useful.
– pi
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Patrick Inhofer
editor, compositor, nice guy
applePi Editorial, nyc
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