Just bought a Pioneer 104 DVD burner!

[davpen]

There is absolutely no doubt that many of the problems described are real incompatibilities. Those described by Wally certainly seem to be. But encoder and media problems do confuse the issue and sometimes make it hard to determine just how compatible -R or +R really are.

I chose DVD-R because its level of compatibility was fairly well documented. DVD+R was too new to the market for there to be any reliable information. But I am really hoping that +R proves superior as I want the highest compatibility and I don't really care who wins the "war". As +R has been somewhat late in arriving I am hoping that the creators have been able to take advantage of that time to produce a more compatible product. If the only advantage over -R proves to be things like the loss less linking then I am going to be very disappointed.


Cheers,

David.

[Jerry Jones]

In my opinion, there is essentially *no* significant format advantage to +R or -R.

The question is:

"Has this device been engineered to work as expected?"

There's no question in my mind - based on my testing - that the engineers who work for Panasonic could have designed the DMR-E20 to produce DVD-R discs that would play on *both* set top stand alone DVD players *and* a wide variety of computer DVD-ROM drives.

Pioneer engineers clearly have succeeded in doing so.

The Pioneer VCR we've tested produces DVD-Rs that play GLITCH-FREE on every DVD player we tried in Ultimate Electronics and every DVD player we have available to us in our work place.

The Panasonic VCR did, too.

The difference between the two devices wasn't the format.

They *both* produce DVD-Rs.

The difference was the engineering.

The Panasonic unit produces DVD-Rs that do *not* play on *all* DVD-ROM drives.

The Pioneer unit produces DVD-Rs that play on *every* DVD-ROM drive we've tried.

The DVD+R disc produced by the Philips DVCR 985 also *failed* to play on all DVD-ROM drives we tried. The disc nearly destroyed our DVS DVD-ROM drive - yet played just fine on every other drive we tested.

Had we produced the DVD+R using a computer drive such as the HP DVD200i, we might have been more successful.

As I mentioned earlier, my Panasonic computer drive - the LF-D311 - produced DVD-Rs that played just fine in our most finnicky DVD-ROM drive.

So each device is engineered differently by a different team that considers what the eventual use for the product will be.

Clearly, the Pioneer engineers developed their VCR believing that their customers would demand compatibility not only with stand alone players, but also with DVD-ROM computer drives.

The Panasonic engineering team for the DMR-E20 VCR clearly believed their customers would only care about playback on stand alone players. They seem to have devoted little effort to those customers who might require DVD-ROM playback as well.

So - with regard to any device - the question should be:

"Has this device been engineered to meet my expectations?"

Format is secondary.

DVD-R and DVD+R are equal in that regard.

DV MAGAZINE has already done a study that verifies that DVD+RW and DVD-RW are equally compatible... neither is better than the other.

The entire story is in the July issue.

If you register on their Web site, you can read the article free of charge:

http://www.dv.com

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Elie]

I totally agree with you Jerrold, and on that believe I bought the Pioneer 104.

Regards,
Elie

[Elie]

Ok folks here is where I need help big time!!

I tried to burn my forst DVD, and after DVDit, would prepare the project for burning, it says canceling right at the point of burning, and then my drive spits out the blank.

I tried a few times but keep getting this error message "Build failed Unknown error DVD Err 264193"

Anyone get this error?

Thanks,
Elie

[johnpr98]

Ellie

1. Make sure DMA for the A04 is DISABLED
2. Check that you have enough room for the temp DVD files on your hard disk, approx 8+GB

[Elie]

"in a heavy scottish accent" ...

Well shiver me timbers, IT WORKED LADS!

A bit odd why running the Pioneer in PIO mode made this thing work is beyond me.

MANY THANKS JOHN !
Ok enough smiles?

Cheers,
Elie

[wkulecz]

Elie,

I got this message on the A03 too. I created an image file with MyDVD using a poorly documented "secret modifer key" (but it is in the help file) and burned with Prassi, this had the advantage of being able to do a verify after buring. Prassi claimed the image on my hard drive matched the image burned to DVD-R I left DMA enabled.

Do you get 2X burn speeds with PIO mode?

I understand the A04 bundle is different and doesn't include Prassi. I have a less than low opinion of the MyDVD bundled with the A03 back in October, hopefully you've got something newer and better.

If DVD+R doesn't prove to be much more compatible that DVD-R was for me, I'll also be returning the Ikebana DVD+RW/R burner. But, so far so good.

--wally.

[Elie]

Thanks Wally,

Maybe it's a problem with DVDit rather than the 104 itself?
because I was able to create a mini DVD with DMA enabled using DVDit however that was from a mpeg-1 file.

The burn process was pretty fast, not sure if it was 2x, it was so late I couldn't even keep my eyes open, had to make sure it worked first.

I took the DVD and played it back on my set top Panasonic and it worked without a hitch and with no corruption.
When rendering out the m2v file however, I did go for a VBR setting of 7mbps, what is the max data rate I can achieve but at the same time be able to playback the DVD in any set top player?

Thanks,
Elie

[orbital]

Hi
I have been using the Ao4 for a few weeks and had no problems yet. No glitches until today. I tried the Tempenc encoder which was extremely fast I must say- but produced glitches.
As regards to media, I prefer the Princo-R for General.

Orbital

[wkulecz]

DVDit is different that MyDVD (but both from Sonic), Hopefully its better, can't possibly be worse IMHO.

As to max data rate, I thought the spec calls for 10 Mpbs, but I'll defer to Doc for the real truth. I pretty much always need more than an hour so I pretty much kept to the 4000-6000 Kpbs range.

I did try one MSP CBR 8000 encoding -- players that didn't glitch played it fine, but it didn't fix the glitches on players that glitched.

I've an update to MyDVD 3.5 with ADS InstantDVD, its still pretty useless since it only does PCM audio thus making it very difficult to get two hours onto a disk since ~25% of the space is taken up by the uncompressed audio! So I've never bothered burning with it. I was very happy with MSP DVD plugin and DVD Movie Factory made disks on the players that didn't glitch -- this is what made it so frustrating!

I've not spent much time testing Panasonic, Sony, or Pioneer players but when I have they've been glitch free.

--wally.