I'm so very tired of this...

OK, so I've figured out that the success of a dual-layer DVD burn is dependent on what I ate for supper on the Wednesday of the week I attempt the burn. No really, that's about as random as it gets.

My brother has notified me that after a weekend here doing no less than 3 test burns in his laptop, he went home with one last ISO on his hard-drive that stubbornly will refuse to burn on a Memorex disc! And while I have a couple of burns on Fujifilm discs prior to giving them away to my brother many months ago when this story started, I've found that CloneDVD2 is NOT compatible with the Fujifilm discs...

So what to do with that ISO? I burn it to the last remaining Philips disc I have... and it... works... sort of. At least it's readable and does not give a "no disc in drive" error. Except, and here's where things get REAL weird: it does not readable in my secondary drive (the Pioneer one). It plays in my stand-alone player with flying colours and is readable in the LG burner, but the Pioneer drive will have none of it.

So now I have another mystery: is my Pioneer drive acting up (it's pretty old)? Why does it read some of my Philips burns and not others? Why will it read that Ultraman movie I made (a rip of a Region 2 DVD I bought) and not a concert I made a year ago when all this started? WTF is going on?!

DL saga: final post (for real this time)

DL Conspiracy: Final Chapter

Two things... I'm going to go back and add a new "tag" type for this because when I started out documenting my troubles with Dual-Layer burning, I never imagined how many entries it would become. So, when you see those old blogs come up in your RSS, feel free to ignore them.

Anyway, I just wanted to report an addendum to the situation. Remember those Memorex DVD+R/DL that I bought? Yeah, the big 50-count spindle that I CANNOT use. Any ISO file imported to CloneDVD2 becomes a freezing, choppy, altogether irritating mess. And Nero makes a weird archive data disc that can only be read on the original burner.
You know what this reminds me of?...it reminds me of how Philips brand discs behave on my brother's laptop. It was completely incompatible. Could not burn to it at all (ISO file or otherwise).

But in an amazing turn, my brother successfully test-burned several ISO files this weekend using his laptop on the Memorex discs. Not only did they play back on his laptop, but they were readable in my two optical drives, and also in my living room DVD player. I gave them away to him.

So that about closes the book on this story. Memorex for him and Philips for me... I'm sure he will give the spindle a loving home.

The region 2 experience

Well, after hemming and hawing a lot, I finally got around to getting an official legit DVD of the big-screen incarnation of Ultraman. In a weird circular way, this is the movie that made me come down hard on Media Blasters for releasing only a 2ch soundtrack on Masked Rider (it still think it sucks). See, this was the polar opposite of the Masked Rider remake - the director went full-speed with the FX and even had a fully CG aerial combat scene... perfect material for a surround sound mix.

Unfortunately, Japan's grasp of 5.1 sound mixing still isn't up to par with Hollywood. It's good... but it isn't great. And actually I detected a "wrong channel" moment when one of the beasts flew "behind me" on the right of the screen but the sound effect came from my left!

But still, after playing with decrypting the region 2 disc and finally managing to successfully burn the disc to a region free DVD so that I can watch this film on my home theatre... I go to bed satisfied.

DL conspiracy: final chapter?

About 4 months ago I had resigned to the fact that Nero wasn't doing its job.

And then about a week or so later, I found a player that actually played my burns.

And you know what else I've discovered since then?
My dad found yet another player that also plays my burns. And of all brands ...it's a Sony one. Yes, the same company so screwed up over content management that they made the PSP insanely user-unfriendly when it came to putting multimedia on it.

The catch? I still haven't figured out what the story is. I have some dual-layer discs that play absolutely flawlessly (and I mean totally glitch-free unlike that grocery-store Accura one)...

...and some that refuse to play at all beyond the main title page. The common denominator being that those were all burned using Nero. I mean, what the hell? I'm not debating whether or not risk yet another DL disc in an attempt to prove that CloneDVD burns work Nero burn don't... And seriously, these discs still aren't common-place enough to be considered cheap.

The DL irony

Well, the book is closed on the mystery of the Nero Dual-Layer burn: I finally found a set-top machine that will play back my "failed" discs. And of course, it's the cheapy no-name brand my father had purchased from (of all places) the grocery store.

Its brand is actually "Accura" and has all the feel of a made-in-taiwan POS. The tray is this heavy-set affair that opens up after what feels like an eternity. There is no LED read-out on the front panel and the only sign of life it will give you is the red light that comes on when you press into the hardwired power switch (no, the remote will not turn it on and off). To its credit, it does have an optical cable for digital sound output. Video signal is limited to RGB component cable. And wow, you can actually hear the drive spinning up the disc (listen to that sound of power). ^_^;;;

As babou said to me, "go figure."

The DL failure

Alright - gonna wrap up this topic for a little while because I simply give up at this point. I don't understand how I got a stable playable burn on that movie for my buddy last night and cannot do the same for the ISOs I downloaded.

Short of using the decryption method (which is used only for the ripping the test disc), I followed the same steps in CloneDVD including the "Clone" option - which performs its own reencode of the VOB set (which as far as I could tell, were identical anyway). In fact, the ending didn't suffer the mystery cut-off glitch that was in the test burn.

Sadly, as things would turn out, my concert disc still freezes at the layer change with my player unable to find the corresponding continuation on the second layer. And the rest of the disc is filled with glitches.

I got a successful (moderately) layer change in my PS2 drive so I'd like to say it's the fault of my old set-top box but that still does not explain why the test burn played fine. The fact is, the test burn and my final ISO burn, despite being on the same discs, coming from the same hardware, and created with the same process, yielded very different results - one playing very smoothly on my old Pioneer DV-333 and the other completely grinding it to a halt.

The DL conspiracy continued

Well, I have my answer - this whole time Nero was apparently not burning dual-layer format correctly on my discs. I don't know what the nuances behind the problems are; the discs work just fine on PC software like PowerDVD or Interactual Player. Nobody I know has a set-top DVD player capable of playing back a Nero burned DVD-Video format DL disc.

So I decided to take turns eliminating the differences between my burns and my buddy's Serenity burn (and I in no way endorse piracy, I'm just saying, it made for a good testing situation). And the first difference was when he admitted to me that he hadn't been using Nero after all (he'd confused himself, he'd later admit). He told me to look up CloneDVD for my ISO needs.

The result: a test burn worked... sort of. Because I was adamant I would follow the example from Doom9 to the letter, I even used the "clone" command in CloneDVD to actually reencode the VOB files I previously ripped to my hard-drive. The glitch was that for whatever reason, CloneDVD's re-encode is missing a few seconds at the end of the final title (including the "goback" chapter that tells a DVD player to return to the main menu when its done).

The follow-up: I tried to burn the concert again, but this time without a re-encode. The disc is better than the Nero attempt in that it plays (more or less) in my living room. However, it has a tendency to glitch a lot with pops, freezes, and skips on the second layer to the point of being unwatchable. Hmm...

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.