Quality DVD Burning

Since the original DVD burner on my PowerMac G4 MDD is pretty old, it can't burn any of the new DVD-R media at anything except 1x speed. So, I've been using an external Sony USB2 DVD burner to burn my videos.

Unfortunately, with the external burner, I would often get verification errors when burning at 4x or above, so I usually kept the burn speed at 2x. Lately, though, I've found that even if the DVD verifies alright and plays alright on my computers, they occasionally glitch on standalone players (the symptom is usually a couple frames of choppy video).

Since I had a feeling that part of my problem was using an external DVD burner, I bought an internal Pioneer DVR-111D drive to replace the older Pioneer in my G4. I was too paranoid to try burning at about 4x, but the 4x burn that I did do worked great.

I also recently found a good tool called Nero CD-DVD Speed to check the quality of DVDs. Unfortunately, this is a Windows program and only works on some drives. The program's Disc Quality check will check for PI (Parity Inner) and PO (Parity Outer) errors and generate a Quality Score. Getting any PO errors is a really bad sign. What I would consider being a really good burn would have a PI error Max (per 8 blocks) of less than 50 and a PI error average of less than 10. For a possibly slightly below average disc that should be playable on most reasonably good players the PI Max should be less than 180 and the average less than 80. These scores are dependent on the burner (as well as how it's connected to the computer) and the quality of the media.

After scanning some of my older burns, it appears that my Maxell discs give the best results which mirrors the information contained in the DVD Media Quality guide contained here.