A support employee of BTC has posted usefull information regarding the use of cheap DVD media. Currently the market of DVD media is rapidly growing and expectations are that there will be an even bigger growth in the future. This has however the side effect that DVD burners will need to support more kinds of media. This is important as the DVD burner has to know the correct laser settings to burn the DVD media correctly and ensure the best quality of your burns.
However the more DVD media manufacturers, the more difficulties DVD recorder manufacturers will have to support them all. And currently there seem also to be discs on the market that use fake information to hide their real identity.
The problem with most media is that, unless you buy media from a well known brand name you can't really tell what you bought until you've tried it on your DVD RW drive. Many unknown companies (mostly small Asian or Eastern European) who are in the business of producing media only for the easy money, take advantage of this fact by luring customers into buying their media by offering extremely low prices. Because the MID code can also be used to trace media back to the manufacturer, they often don't use any MID code and rumor has it that some companies even "steal" MID codes from other manufacturers, making it look like the discs are made by reliable companies. The 1st problem with this type of media is that the quality may be unreliable, though this is not necessarily the case. The 2nd problem is that your drive may be incompatible with this media, at least until the drive manufacturer has become aware of the existence and characteristics of those media and has gone through the trouble of locating, purchasing and tuning a new firmware. Most drive manufacturers keep close contact with all the wellknown media manufacturers to make sure their drives can support all the media that are manufactured by them. It's an almost impossible job to keep track of all these small media companies, however, who in some cases don't even want to be found in the first place ! In these cases, if a drive manufacturer wants to support these media, the response will have to come from the endusers who buy these media and alert the drive manufacturer about the existence of those media. |
The story is even more complicated and we would recommend you to read the entire thread: The truth about DVD RW Media, MID codes and Firmwares: beware of cheap media! It contains valuable information.
All with
all, know that if you are buying cheap media you could be in trouble on the long
run. Many of you might have good experiences with cheap media, but this is not a
guarantee for the future. However if you have found cheap DVD media that works
well with your drive, then please share this with other CD Freaks vistors, as cheap is not
per defitinion bad.
To keep yourself updated on what DVD media is good, and what DVD media is bad (in combination with your drive) visit our Media Forum, which is the place to be for CD and DVD media testing. Use DVDIdentifier to find out who manufacturers your discs.
Source: Club CD Freaks
