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CD
Burning / DVD Burning Tips To
avoid burning unusable, unplayable, incompatible or defective discs (a.k.a.
"coasters"), we recommend the following ·
Use high
quality media. Defects in the media
will cause defects in your written disc. Sometimes
you can see physical defects in the media on the underside (where you are
writing through the disc to the recording layer under the printed side, or in
the middle of a DVD±R/RW). Physical
defects include things like scratches, scuffs, stains, contamination, defects in
the plastic, pinholes in the metal layer, or areas where the recording dye is
missing. ·
Keep your
hands off the disc... or at least the underside of the disc.
Don’t use a "gorilla grip". Grab
the disc by stretching your hand across the topside, so you are only touching
the outer edges of the disc. Or,
place one finger in the center hole and your thumb on the outer edge.
Fingerprints or dirt on the bottom of the disc can cause distortion of
the writing or reading laser. ·
Keep your
discs dust-free. Store them in
cases, or keep the spindle of blank discs covered.
Before you burn, take a look at the underside surface of the disc.
If you see any dust, blow it off with a gentle shot of clean, filtered
compressed dry air (not by blowing on it with your mouth). If
you don’t have clean compressed air, you can gently wipe off a dusty disc with
a clean, dry cloth, but you run the risk of scratching or smearing the surface. ·
Never wipe
discs in a circle. In general, we
don’t recommend trying to clean discs. In
an otherwise hopeless case, you can try some warm soapy water, without scrubbing
the surface. Rinse with warm water
and dry using a compressed air or a clean cloth. ·
Plan your
burn - figure out what kind of disc you want to make.
If you want to make the disc playable in an audio CD player, you can’t
format it as a ROM (data) disc. If
you want a DVD to play in DVD Video players, you can’t format it as a DVD-ROM.
·
Burn using
Disc-at-Once mode whenever practical. Track-At-Once
mode is meant to help avoid buffer underruns on slower computers, but causes
overlapping sectors in between tracks called "link transitions".
While this is allowed by the Orange Book (CD-R) specification, these
discs are not suitable for use as a Master Disc for CD Replication facilities,
due to the digital errors between tracks, or possible discontinuity of the CD
timecode. In general, use
Disc-at-Once unless you have to use Track-at-Once. ·
Turn off
other programs, including screen savers. If
you have problems with buffer underruns, you should choose a slower writing
speed. You should also turn off
virus protection software. For the
best results, don’t run any other programs while you are burning. ·
Keep your hard
disks defragmented. While this is a
good idea for better PC performance in general, it is an especially good idea
for people who do a lot of audio or video editing, or other multimedia
production. If your hard disk is
highly fragmented, it will have to seek to many sections in order to read and
write each file. This will slow down
the transfer rate of data to and from the hard drive, and it could cause buffer
underruns when burning. In general,
don’t let your hard drive fill up more than 75% to 80%.
The hard drive fills up from outside to inside - the opposite of CDs and
DVDs. This is because the transfer
rate is faster at the outside, due to the greater circumference (a higher linear
velocity for a given rotation speed). So,
the portion of the hard drive that is written to when your drive is nearly full
is slower than the portion that is written to when it is nearly empty.
Also, a defragmenter won’t run well or won’t run at all when the
drive is too full, as it needs space to work. ·
While higher speed recording saves time and generally results in great discs,
slower speed recordings may give you your best chance for a higher quality disc,
with lower error rates. If you think
you have problems, or if you have time to burn (no pun intended), slow your
burning speed down to 4X, 2X, or 1X. ·
Use a
felt-tip marker to write on the top of your recordable discs.
Never use a ball-point pen, or roller ball pen.
These pens could damage the recording layer, which is just beneath the
printed top layer. ·
Don’t
leave open sessions. Unless you are
storing data in increments to a recordable disc (using multi-session recording),
you should "finalize" your recording. This
will allow your burning software program to write a lead-out to the end of your
session. This is necessary for compatibility
with audio CD players. ·
If all else
fails, or to make multiple identical copies, save your project as an image file.
For instance, if you are using GEAR's CD
Burning / DVD Burning Software, go to the "Project" menu, and choose "Convert volume to physical".
This physical image can be used to write discs. ·
Keep in mind
that some types of players, particularly DVD video players, can not play back
certain recordable disc formats. For
more information, see the dvdrhelp.com web site. |
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DVDBurning.biz
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