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Date:	Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:06:34 PDT7
From:	jbrush@aros.net
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: DVD writer recommendation

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>
>All comments/observations welcome....

>Speak!
>

Okay :-)

I think CD-R and its offspring suck, and I have not seen anything to cause me
to believe DVD will be any different. I have thrown away more CDs than I have
kept, and that number is in the hundreds. I have had quite a few different R-R/W
devices and they continue to make me a lot of coasters. I would say my success
rate over the years is no more than 50 or 60 percent. I also have dozens of
backup type CD-Rs made on an, at the time, state-of-the-art Plextor, which
cannot even be read by any reader other than the that one device, which is
carefully stored in the closet, in case I ever need it. What year is this, and
how long have we had computers that this stuff is still allowed to happen?

Even CDR/W fails, and who has hours and hours to wait while it is formatted? I
recall when floppies arrived as unformated, and folks demanded that they come
pre-formatted to save time and aggravation, yet when I buy a CDR/W, it has to
grind away for hours to format it. This is the 21st century, right?

How long will it take to format a DVD-R/W when they come along? I only have a
few dozen years of life left..... :-)

Music CDs that burn 89% and die, or come up with more "pops" than Orville
Redenbacher, data that burns, and cannot be read ( I am not talking about multi
sessions, I am talking dead CDs) and so many that actually used to work and now
deliver CRC errors no matter how clean and safe I keep them.

Hey, and how about those 50X CD players that sound like vacuum cleaners when you
access them, or put a CD in em? I am always amazed to note that my 50X players
NEVER deliver throughput beyond what amounts to about 18X to 20X at the most. I
have used an 8X burner to copy from a 50X player, and the player cannot keep up.
I know there are other factors, but that is pretty ridiculous when you think
about it. Yep, copy the CD to the hard drive, and then to the burner is a
solution, but its a solution that reeks of bill gate's brain children.

I am talking Windows and OS/2 software. RSJ was a waste of money for me, and CD
Record is a nightmare to install. I almost always boot windows to make a CD
because the success rate with that software is much higher. I have lots of CDs
that I made with RSJ, but most can only read on an OS/2 machine. I no longer
care why, or how to fix it, as I chalk it up to the microsoft way of doing
business. "so long as it kind of works, most of the time, for a majority of
people, that is good enough"

I can say that even tho I have had more than a few burners of various write
speeds, I have NEVER had any degree of success burning beyond 4X. I use the
test, and then burn mode, and honestly, even at 4X, half the time, it bombs out
in the test mode, and there is little that pisses me off more than when the test
works, and then the burn fails. Even with OS/2, the machine is off limits when
burning a CD, and at 4X, that can take forever.

I have a suggestion that is too late, but what the heck. When the buffer
underruns, burn trash on the CD and use a pointer to let the reading device know
that that part of the CD is bad, and to skip ahead to wherever the data comes
back as good. Duh! That might use a bit of space, and require some hardware
enhancements to the burner, but it would insure that almost all CDs would be
usable when the burner is done. Even FAT formatted drives can have bad sectors
and still be used by reading around them, but the sad spec for the mighty CD
says that if the buffer underruns, the whole CD is toast. I am aware of the
technicalities involved. Been around the engineering business for quite a while.
I know also that it can be done, but with computer products, you can have two of
the three options: cheap, fast, or good, and the industry always goes with the
first two.....

How long will we be using DVDs before they do what they did with CDR/Ws and just
change the format so we all have to change burners and CDs?

I continue to use hard drives for backups and storage. Funny how such tiny
microdrive stepper motors work year after year, yet a CD burner cannot
consistenly do the job.

Now, on the lighter side, since the rest of the world seems to have no problems
in this area, I am okay with the fact that I just don't know how to click a
mouse, and make the software work, but I am in no hurry to put nearly 5 gigs of
data on a disk, and have it die at the end, or come up CRC error when used in a
different DVD player, or even wait around while it burns and fails on the last
few bits of data. No thanks, I think the technology sucks today, and will
continue to suck in the future. Too much 'microsoft" mentality in this industry,
and not enough quality research and development to create top notch, reliable
hardware.

Hey, that was pretty theraputic!! Thanks for letting me say it all. I am sure no
one will agree, but it felt good to say it out loud

After all, you did ask :-)

John

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