Diagnosing HARDWARE (Liteon 851S) vs MEDIA (Khypermedia)

[ImSeeker]

I finally installed my Liteon 851S I got in the OfficeMax sale last month. (Tons of reasons for delay and irrelevant here.)

It seems great... but. It will burn discs, no errors I can see, and Nero seems to work, DVD Shrink seems to work, I can make data discs, and movies as well.

These discs will also play fine in the unit itself.

BUT - they will not play in regular dvd players (I've tried an Apex 600 and a couple of others that have played other dvd-r discs at other times). Also, I put the data discs or movies into other dvd-roms in my other computers - on the same system that has the 851s, I also have an LTD163 - it plays about halfway through a movie then chokes. It reads some files, chokes on others.

Another dvd-rom won't load these at all.

SO - is it the 851S or the media? Is there a way to diagnose it other than just "try more"? i.e. I can either go to OfficeMax and buy more media of a different type and try them. Or I can give up on the 851S and hope Officemax will exchange it after 6 weeks.

My first inclination as a "good scientist" is to run to the store and buy different media to try. But I suspect it may do the same. I haven't seen any complaints anywhere about this combination of hardware/media.

Bottom line: Sure I want to fix my system, so that's the main point, but really, for anyone:

Is there a standard way to diagnose where the problem is? A software package to evaluate how a drive writes? A package to evaluate the quality of a burned disk?

Thanks for any help.

[ImSeeker]

Continuing to diagnose my own situation.

Found two other DVD players - and they play the movies fine up until the last 10 or so minutes - then they begin freezing and breaking up. Fairly consistently, and this matches the LTD163 doing the same, and on data where the LTD163 won't read certain areas.

Is this usually hardware and how it writes (calibration/tracking issues) or the media?

And again, any software to test such things?

[ronco]

ok,,seems nobody else has yet has tried yet so heres my go.....
i have had extremely good luck with over 50 movies and no coasters....have been using the +r media..burning at 4x..shut down as many running programs as you can...
have heard good thing about the liteon..
try a slower burn if you can,,,some program may be trying to acces time while burning and screwing thing up.
you are getting bad burns from something that is taking place at diff times,,if so it is causing a "blip" that makes your burner skip?
try task manager to see how much cpu is used..
prob not the media or the burner but something in your puter..
as usuall,,defrag,,scandisk....OR you may have just got a borderline burner....
wish i could help more..

[ImSeeker]

As often is the truth the answer is many things.

Khypermedia is crappy with these drives. So first, the media isn't too good. With TDKs from Costco, it worked fine.

My LTD163 is old. It doesn't like what the 851 puts out (especially on the Khypermedia).

I went ahead and exchanged the 851s for an 811s (yes, it was a Pacific Digital exchange at OfficeMax) - the Khypermedias were still crap, but the 811s did "a little bit better" - the LTD163 still hates them, but at least there isn't a read problem at the end, more like an overall problem in general, but maybe just a shade better. Again the TDKs work fine, period.


Don't you love it when it is a little bit of everything at fault?


Final result: sticking with the 811s, although the 851s probably was ok, and swearing off buying khypermedia ever again.