[CALUG] CDwriters

[jason maxwell]

oh, also, my system is not especially fast and i have made coasters of
dvds before too. i use the speed option in growisofs to throttle the
write speed a bit and havnt ruined a disk since.

i have never ruined a dvdrw disk, i have always been able to re-blank
them if need be using dvd+rw-format.

if you're interested in making video dvd backups, check out my howto
at jaxwell.com/dvd/dvd_howto.html
--Jason

On 12/11/05, jason maxwell <decepticon at gmail.com> wrote:
> to write cds, you need mkisofs and cdrecord. to write dvds you need
> also need growisofs, and dvd+rw-tools. you also need dvdauthor if you
> are writing video dvds.
> or, you can install K3B, as mentioned before which is a decent gui
> frontend for all of the above.
> --Jason
>
> On 12/9/05, Bart Nielsen <blniels at softhome.net> wrote:
> > I've got a 5 year old computer, and I've always envied the faster speeds
> > with the newer CD writers.  (Mine would write at about 4x --- a little
> > slower than the newer ones on the market today.  But I used to say "but
> > it works well..." and let it go at that.)
> >
> > Well --- it worked well till Monday.
> >
> > I tried buying a DVD writer a few months ago (maybe 6), and found that:
> >
> > * Yes, the firewire port works...(neat --- it was the first time I've
> > had a firewire device to play with), as does the USB ports (I knew
> > that), but the internal DVD writer didn't work as either an internal or
> > an external device.  (It was suggested by my friends that perhaps
> > getting the IDE traffic off the internal bus would speed up the
> > processor and I'd get better performance.  I didn't realize you could
> > turn a DVD+RW into a coaster --- I'm guessing it was the copy protection
> > issues and there is section of the drive that they expect to be written
> > exactly once.  So, when I wrote it poorly because my computer is slow,
> > well, it was game over for that device...)
> >
> > But it led me to believe that I didn't want to try that experiment again
> > till I have a faster computer, which isn't happening right now.  Maybe
> > in a few months...
> >
> >
> > So I went to BEST BUY and bought a new writer.  They had two that looked
> > like they would work --- and the Memorex writer was initially priced $
> > 10 less than the Sony, and had 4x the buffer space, so it looked like a
> > winner.
> >
> > I've been using cdrecord to write the disks (all of the gui's tend to
> > use that so fill in the name of your favorite gui here if it makes you
> > feel any better), and readcd -c2scan to check the accuracy.  I had a
> > much better disk with the new writer --- but it still wasn't perfect.
> > (It reported 0.000400 % errors --- which I figured would be less than
> > 0.5 seconds for the 10 hours of MP3's that I had stored on the cd.)
> >
> > Except when I actually listened to my CD, the errors were arranged such
> > that I dropped some of the 10 minute tracks entirely --- so I lost a lot
> > more than the raw numbers suggested I should.
> >
> >
> > I just went back to BestBuy, and told them that I wanted to try
> > something else.  They were really easy to work with --- even though I
> > had already mailed in the rebate, they took back my box (I had trouble
> > with that at CompUSA 5 years ago --- they sold me a Pacific Data
> > CDwriter that was usb based for my wife's mac, and when I finally
> > openned it, there was a note that said "yup --- we know we said it would
> > work, but it won't".  For a month, they still thought it would, but
> > after that, they wouldn't even admit that it might work some time.   But
> > they wouldn't take it back because I had asked for a rebate, thus, I
> > didn't have the scan code --- and, well, anyone want a rarely used
> > USB-based (usb1) CD writer?  It's been resting at my home since then.
> >
> >
> > So, the other writer is a Sony writer --- same specs, but it has 25% of
> > the buffer space.  I don't have a lot of experience with the new drive,
> > but the result of readcd -c2scan was 'better' than I've seen for any of
> > my other drives as of late, namely:
> >
> >
> > CDB:  BE 00 00 04 91 D3 00 00 2E FA 00 00
> > status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
> > Sense Bytes: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0A 00 00 00 00 64 00 00 00
> > Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0
> > Sense Code: 0x64 Qual 0x00 (illegal mode for this track) Fru 0x0
> > Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid)
> > cmd finished after 0.063s timeout 40s
> > readcd: Input/output error. Cannot read source disk
> > readcd: Retrying from sector 299475.
> > .............................................
> > readcd: Input/output error. Error on sector 299519 not corrected. Total
> > of 1 errors.
> > readcd: -noerror set, continuing ...
> > .
> > readcd: Input/output error. Error on sector 299520 not corrected. Total
> > of 2 errors.
> > readcd: -noerror set, continuing ...
> > addr:   299521
> > Time total: 210.412sec
> > Read 773957.58 kB at 3678.3 kB/sec.
> > Total of 2 hard read errors.
> > C2 errors total: 0 bytes in 0 sectors on disk
> > C2 errors rate: 0.000000%
> > C2 errors on worst sector: 0, sectors with 100+ C2 errors: 0
> >
> > real    3m30.832s
> > user    0m0.668s
> > sys     0m3.591s
> >
> >
> > I tried mounting both my iso image in loop back mode and the new drive,
> > and then running diff against both file systems:
> >
> > time diff -r . /media/dvd
> >
> > real    5m13.197s
> > user    0m3.208s
> > sys     0m30.989s
> >
> >
> > So, it looks better than what I saw before.
> >
> > I read the image in with dd:
> >
> > time dd if=/dev/dvd of=xxx.iso
> > dd: reading `/dev/dvd': Input/output error
> > 1198080+0 records in
> > 1198080+0 records out
> >
> > real    4m53.773s
> > user    0m2.151s
> > sys     1m7.999s
> >
> >
> > and while the input file (iso-10.iso) and the output file (xxx.iso) are
> > slightly different:
> >
> > 613414912 versus
> > 613416960 bytes
> >
> > cmp -b xxx.iso iso-10.iso
> > cmp: EOF on iso-10.iso
> > linux:>
> >
> >
> > It looks like those differences aren't significant.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > I wondered if anyone else had experience with this sort of thing.  If
> > the CDwriter mostly works, I'm going to drop it --- but I'm surprised
> > that a drive with a smaller buffer is doing a better job than a drive
> > with a larger buffer.  (Maybe skill in using the buffer makes more
> > difference than the buffer size itself?)
> >
> > Comments?  (It looks like, for my system, today, I'm happier with the
> > Sony drive --- but which drive would you buy, and why?  I opted against
> > a DVD writer combo because I anticipate that when I want to do that,
> > I'll buy a complete system that has a DVD/CDwriter integrated, and the
> > extra $ 10 - 50 wouldn't ever be recouped by me because I'll never be
> > able to use the added functionality (unless I really want to turn more
> > DVD's into coasters...)
> >
> > Bart.
> >
> >
> >
> >
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