PC: of new drives and old drives

Well there she is: a shiny new black drive sitting inside of Zero Prime's black box. For those of you just joining us, I'm talking about the LG drive at the top - it replaces a Pioneer DVD-ROM drive who's only crime was being beige. Now I need to figure out how to paint that floppy drive at the bottom... Hmm...

You can't really tell by the resolution, but the second optical drive is also a burner. Why did I buy a second burner, you ask? Just because it was my birthday (I won't say when exactly - I value my personal privacy despite the amount of blogging I do). Secondly, I had several MoMusu-related concerts sitting on my hard-disk. They were full 7Gb ISO images and well, I decided I wanted to do away with down-converting them with DVDShrink.

There's a third reason - it involves my brother discovering that his new spindle of DVD blanks he bought are somehow incompatible with his own burner... so guess who got "free" blanks to test with?

The results are a mixed bag and put me in an awkward position. Firstly, I've learned that the discs are indeed compatible with this new burner (and with the old single-layer one too; except in a read-only capacity, of course, duh). There were a couple of oddities...

First, the Nero (the famous burning software) seemed to think my ISOs were for CD and refused to burn them to the DVD (this in spite of the fact that the ISOs would've required something on the order of 26 individual CDs to contain the sheer size). Never mind that - I went back to my trusty DVDShrink to extract the ISO into its component VOB files. Then I burned those to the disc...

Nero performed the "verify data" routine without a hitch. The trouble came when I brought the disc out to the living room. Seems my old Pioneer set-top player doesn't particularly enjoy the second layer. Chapter-skipping ahead is sort of okay (once it gets going). But forget menus or the chapter that actually bridges the layers. Which is sort of disappointing because wasn't the whole point of this execise to get minimum compression from my PC to my living room home theatre? Mmm... I think I smell is a cheapy new DVD player in my future.