UNRELIABLE BURNING

[nyquist1]

I have two Pioneer DVD drives installed, a SATA-connected DVR-218L and a IDE-connected DVR-111D. When using MovieFactory 7 I can write reliably to the IDE drive , however not to the SATA drive. Get MPEG artefacts associated with poor BER - picture blocking, "splats" on audio, occasional picture freezing. Itried initially writing a disc image file to the PC's hard drive and then using MF7's Copy utility to burn to the DVD drive - this allows burn speed to be altered. However all to no avail.

When I used Infrarecorder (freeware) burning software to burn the disc image, this seemed to work OK. Any thoughts on the apparent incompatibility issue?

[DVDDoug]

I'd be surprised if it were a software problem... It could be a bad drive or, you might have a bad batch of discs. I once had a "spool" of discs, and about half were turning-out bad. I'd try a different "batch" of discs before you draw any final conclusions.

Get MPEG artefacts associated with poor BER - picture blocking, "splats" on audio, occasional picture freezing.

I check all of my burns with Nero DiscSpeed (FREE!!!). It makes a graph of disc-reading speed, and you'll see a "glitch" in the curve if the drive gets an error, or if it has to re-read a spot. It's a lot easier and more reliable than watching the whole DVD looking for defects! Different drives will give you different speed-curves, so try it with a known disc first (and dual-layer discs will also give a different graph).