Using "Verify contents" when copying discs

[Gerry]

I know folks here have talked about not burning disks faster than 8x if possible, but I've been making direct copies of my movie DVDs for archiving purposes and have the option of burning at 18x -- obviously more than twice as fast.

If I use Nero's "Verify disc contents" option, would I be safe burning at 18x and knowing it'd be the same quality as the original?

Or do I even need to use that "Verify" option at all?

[Chuck Engels]

The only problem with burning that fast is the DVD players have trouble playing the disc.
If you want to have discs that are most compatible then you need to burn at 8x or slower, 4x or 2.4x are even better.

Give it a shot and see what happens Gerry, and maybe someone that has tried it will let us know what their experience has been.

[kodebuster]

My experience is pretty straight forward.

I (used to) archive my commercial DVD's and burn at max speed (18x) on the cheapest crap discs I could find.

For reading back on my PC DVD player (where the DVD was burned at high speed), things look great.

Play back on stand alone DVD Players hooked to a TV, played like crap (drop out progressively bad towards the end of play time).

Keeping the burn speed at max and switching to high quality DVD disc's was the ticket to paradise (Taiyo Yuden Silver Premium disc's).

When I'm real paranoid about giving a finished DVD to a friend or client, I'll burn at super slow speed, on the Yuden disc's.

If I don't like the person, they get a fast burn on the cheap crap (just kidding)...LOL...

On a serious note, I think the quality of the blank disc is a much greater factor, then the actual speed of the burn.

Although the technical merits for a slow burn make sense, I have trouble qualifying this in my existing envirnment...

Getting back to the "Verify Routine", It doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you can read the disc okay on the same player you just used to burn it.

The true test is it's read worthiness across any variety of DVD players (that you can get your hands on)...

[Peru]

Using "verify" on any burning program is like the old TV vacuum tube testers that used to be common in stores years ago.
It it said it was "bad", it was was "bad", but if it said it was "good", you could not be sure that it was good.

I recently burned some cds as a backup on one computer and tried to read them on another computer (same software on both computers). Sometimes it would not recognize the disc; sometimes it would read it but you could not open or copy the files. I thought I had a disc drive problem, but both disc drives on the second computer had the same problems. I reburned the files on the discs from the same sleeve and they worked ok. In all cases they were verified as ok.

So if it verifies "bad" it is bad; if it verifies "good" it may be "good".

[Bob]

Using "verify" on any burning program is like the old TV vacuum tube testers that used to be common in stores years ago.
It it said it was "bad", it was was "bad", but if it said it was "good", you could not be sure that it was good.

"Verify" reads what was written to the disc and compares it to the original source data. If even one bit didn't match, the copy is bad. If it is good, it simply means that the copy as written and read by this drive was an exact match to the original. That doesn't mean you can read the disc on another drive or even the same drive at a later time. There is some variation present in all drives and age/condition of the drive affects this too. It's quite possible to write a disc that can only be read by the drive that wrote it. Even if the disc was written within industry specifications, quality of the discs vary also and can become corrupt or unreadable over time. Poor quaility disks are especially problematic. Temperature can affect things as well. There is another thread on this site that describes how paper labels on the disc caused problems when the disc was warm versus when it was cold.

I always verify. If it's bad from the gitgo, I want to know about it right away.

[RJ Johnston]

Over the years I have had a few discs that were verified in Nero Burning ROM, but I couldn't read them later. I sometimes wonder what is actually being compared, the data in a buffer recently read off the disc, or a fresh read off the disc.