Dilution of quality thoughts??

[ragu421]

Howdy, I have a question.When you make copys of dvd's that are from copys of dvd's and so on,is there a loss of quality.I know there was with VHS but Ive often wondered.When I trade or do B&P's I always burn at the slowest possible speed as memory serves when we did "high speed dubs" with cassettes their was a loss of quality.I know it may sound stupid but I have often wondered about that.Any thoughts??Also, another one: Does writing on the disc with a sharpee marker degrade it in any way?OK,Theres my 3 stupid questions for the day.Educate me please.

[thisistoto]

since it is all digital information, it really wont make that much of a difference, but its hard to say as this kind of media has not been around long enough for us to really judge. and since there is no physical tape such as that on a vhs, the degration value wont be nearly there.


and as far as the sharpies, no. stanford did a test on this very question, and as long as you dont slam your marker into the cd you will be fine. if you are really concered, with your backup dvds/cds you can just write on the intter wring.

[Five]

if you burn with verify enabled and it comes out okay, it should be perfect. you can double-check by generating md5 checksums from the DVD you burned and also from the DVD you copied. They should be exactly identical. It is a little bit different for audio cdrs, but applies to FLAC "data" discs equally.

Burning at a slower speed makes for better longevity (so its been said, not exactly proven but I do believe this).

I have never had a problem with sharpies, been writing on lots of discs for years. If you're trading its good etiquette not to write on the discs or attatch post-it notes directly to the disc.

[DanielG]

Originally Posted by ragu421

When I trade or do B&P's I always burn at the slowest possible speed as memory serves when we did "high speed dubs" with cassettes their was a loss of quality.

There's little advantage to burning discs at the slowest setting. As long as you defragment your hard drive every once and a while, you should have no problems burning at 4X. Try burning a disc at 4X and look at the "buffer" levels. If they are always up at around 90% - 95% then you're fine.

If you have a separate hard drive for your shows and use quality DVD media (Taiyo Yuden etc.) then give 8X a go. I've got shows I've burned at 16X that still play fine a year later, but I wouldn't recommend burning at that speed if you're going to be trading the discs...

[U2Lynne]

I used to always generate md5s from the newly burned DVD and compare them to the ones I had on my drive. They were always exactly the same*, so I stopped doing that. I always allow Toast to verify the disc after it is burned.



* sometimes the burning application will 'change' the .ifo and .bup files but that is OK as long as the .vobs are left alone.