Burning a video DVD for old people

[Adcadet]

My wife's family put together a video of a family member. We're making copies on DVD. I burned a bunch of copies onto Ridata DVD+R media a few months ago and tested it on my computer's DVD player and home theater (I use that term loosely) DVD player - a Tivo/DVD combo. In both it played fine. Now months later when I go to test the DVD, it still plays fine in my computer but skips and takes forever to load in the Tivo/DVD. Is there something that goes bad in some disks that let them play well for a short length of time? Is there an easy way to burn a bunch of disks that I can be relatively certain the old (age >70 years) family members in another state can play?

 

[Mercutio]

Writable DVD quality varies IMMENSELY even from batch to batch.

What I have found to work best is:
8x Taiyo Yuden A-grade media burned at 8x speed. Use 16x Media if you have to, but BURN AT 8X. Not 4x, not 2x, not 16x. I do not know why, but stuff works best that way.

And don't use +Rs. Use -R. And Ridata is junk media. So is Princo.

I buy mine from Supermediastore.com.

I burn between 30 and 40 discs a week, and these are really things I've found to work best. 16x burns, in particular, will verify just fine but will skip or have MPEG errors on playback.

Store writable media ASAP. Put it in a clamshell or at least a plastic sleeve if you aren't watching it.

I do almost all my work with Nero version 7, AnyDVD and DVD Decrypter.

 

[Handruin]

All that information is great but is missing one piece of data. Which DVD burner are you using? It is possible the burner has a variation on the quality of your discs just as much as the disc qualities vary them self.

 

[Mercutio]

I mainly use NEC 3550s, but I also have LiteOn and Pioneer. I do not think the drive has much to do with the quality of the Burn.

 

[mangyDOG]

I just binned over 1k of Ridata DVDs that I had in stock, the quality of them was so bad I refused to even give them away to customers. I only sell Verbatim disks now and have no problems at all with them. I do agree with Mercutio that for burning video it is best to do it at 8x, but for data I don't think it matters. I have tested quite a lot of data dvds (used for backing up my photo collection) with parity files and CRC programs and not had any problems on the Verbatim disks.

 

[Adcadet]

What on earth would cause the disks to play fine one month, but the next they won't on my DVD player while still playing fine on my computer's DVD player?

 

[Adcadet]

Is it me, or was the whole DVD thing rushed to market? Everything I read about DVDs makes me think that DVD burning is an immature technology saddled with stupid DRM issues on the player side.

 

[P5-133XL]

What on earth would cause the disks to play fine one month, but the next they won't on my DVD player while still playing fine on my computer's DVD player?

It is quite possible that your DVD player is starting to lose alignment, while your computer's DVD player isn't. There are also distinct differences between different players ability to deal with correctable errors . To determine it if is the disk vs the players, you really need to test more than just two.