Rolandes Ramblings

I consider myself to be fairly technical. Many people consider me to be an uber geek, although I am not all the way there yet. Anyway, after years of being sidelined studying and doing other more important family things, I finally have gotten time to deal with using my DVD burner for “things” other than archiving/backups.

I used DVD Decrypter to rip an ISO a while back and after it was completed I realized the source disc was dual layer and the ISO ended up being over 8Gig. Now I have a DVD burner that supports the Dual Layer -R discs but they are not exactly that cheap to buy and possibly turn into coasters or frisbees. So I have a stack of 8x DVD -R discs that support up to 4.7Gig. So, of course, now the problem becomes how do I make an 8Gig image fit onto a 4.7Gig disc? I didn’t bother with it at the time because I ended up accepting a new job and moving to Ohio.

Luckily for me, when I did have the time, Google had all the answers. So with a couple quick searches I have all the answers to the questions I had (or so I thought…)

I followed a decent tutorial with recommendations on various tools to get the job done. I installed the necessary software and walked through the million or so options and preferences for each of them. I finally get to the point that I am ready to make my first feeble attempt at ripping, encoding, and burning. After an hour or so of ripping with DVD43 and Nero and then encoding with Nero Recode2, I am supposedly ready to burn my first image. The first 2 parts were fairly easy but just took some time as they thrashed my AthlonXP 2800.

Attempt #1

So, I fire up Nero Burning ROM and insert a blank DVD. I select 8x speed since my drive and media both support it. I start the burning process and intently watch the process to see how it goes. After about 5 minutes or so I have created “Coaster #1″. Write Error.

Crap!

So, my instinct is that there was an issue at 8x or something of that sort. So my first thought is to go and make sure Nero and all drive firmware is up to date. One of my handy little tools thankfully does it automagically for me. This reduces some pain. I upgrade Nero in a few minutes to the latest patched release and I also download updated firmware for both my DVD-ROM and my DVD Burner. Reboot.

Attempt #2

Fire up Nero Burning ROM and insert another blank DVD. I select 8x speed again. I start the burning process and intently watch the process to see how it goes. After about 5 minutes or so I have created “Coaster #2″. Write Error.

Double Crap!

Now I am thinking my drive or media have an issue with 8x compatibility or something even though they are both Sony. You wouldn’t think this would be possible but I had heard of this issue with older drives and media. Never the less, I am going to make this work.

Attempt #3

So, let’s try 4x and see how that goes. Fire up Nero Burning ROM and insert another blank DVD. I select 4x speed this time. I start the burning process and intently watch the process to see how it goes. After about 5 minutes or so I have created “Coaster #3″. Write Error.

This is getting ridiculous!

So, I go and lookup DVD burning issues on Google and search through a few threads and find that there are some issues with DVD43 and Nero and certain encryption blah blah blah… So what next? Let’s rip with DVD Decrypter instead since it seems to not have the same issues as DVD43. So, I rip the image one more time. 30 or 40 minutes later I fire up Nero Recode2 and I encode the image.

Attempt #4

Fire up Nero Burning ROM and insert another blank DVD. I select 4x speed again. I start the burning process and intently watch the process to see how it goes. After about 5 minutes or so I have created “Coaster #4″. Another Write Error!

You HAVE to be kidding me!?

There has to be an issue with the source media that Nero is trying to burn. Something within the source is causing issues. I have another idea to try. This is getting rather sadistic. So, I had been encoding to a hard drive folder and the software automatically created the standard DVD folder structure. I thought maybe I should try encoding to an ISO image instead of a bunch of files. I went back to the previously encoded files and used Nero to create an ISO image instead. After a few minutes I had an ISO ready to go.

Attempt #5

Fire up Nero Burning ROM and insert another blank DVD. I select 4x speed again. I start the burning process and intently watch the process to see how it goes. I intently watch the process awaiting failure at about the 5 minute mark. This time it sails right past the normal failure point. Unbelievably it completes successfully.

I pull the disc out and take it over to the entertainment center and pop it in my DVD player. The player reads the disc and starts the initial lead-in video. Yeah, I think that it finally worked. The player goes to load the first Preview video and I had re-authored the disc to exclude that content. In its place it put an image stating the content had been removed. So, I skip by the 4 previews and all of a sudden I can tell my DVD player kind of freaks out. It essentially stops reading the disc and starts over from the beginning.

Not again!? Back to the drawing board. This is torture…

So, I am pretty sure that screwing with re-authored content is problematic. So, let’s use a different tool to reauthor and encode instead of Nero’s Recode2. This time I use DVD Shrink and I select just the “Main Title” and a couple of the audio streams and subtitles. After 50 minutes or so I have a nice ISO image…(cross fingers)

Attempt #6

Fire up Nero Burning ROM and insert yet another blank DVD. I select 4x speed again. I start the burning process and intently watch the process to see how it goes. Again this time it sails right past the normal failure point and it completes successfully.

After hours of experimentation even with all of the tutorials and recommendations out there, I have finally completed the journey. I pop the disc into my DVD player and it is golden. I ended up burning another video after this and followed the same process only I set it for 8x speed and it copied just fine as well. So, for some reason, something did not like burning from the source files. It preferred an ISO image as the source.

What a pain in the butt to put it mildly! I am not an average computer user nor am I just somewhat experienced. I would put myself closer to the expert category, although my true area of expertise lies in network technology. I have worked with computers regularly since I was about 10 years old from Apple, Sinclair, Commodore, Osborne, IBM, and white box Intel, as well as various other commercial platforms like Sun, SGI, Digital, Compaq and Data General. I have worked with many different Operating Systems as well from CP/M and DOS to many flavors of Linux and Unix and pretty much every Windows platform to date as well as Novell. How can this process be THAT difficult and waste that many blank DVD’s???

Even after reading a lot of the How-To information on the specifically recommended software packages I still failed. I have quite a bit of patience when it comes to this stuff. I like to constantly learn new things, so I guess I am a glutton for this sort of punishment. But I still think it’s ridiculous. The majority of normal users would have never gotten it to work.

Ok, so maybe that IS the point. It is just annoying that it has to be that experimental and tedious to figure out.