"Paul" wrote in message
...
Jo-Anne wrote:
One more DVD problem: Recently, I bought a bunch of brand-new DVDs of a
TV series and have been playing them on my laptop (a 2008 Dell running
WinXP, using VLC Media Player) to make sure they're OK. Most of them are,
but a few have been hiccuping--that is, both the audio and the video stop
for a moment and then continue on. Sometimes, if I remove the DVD from
the drive and put it back in, I can play through the formerly bad
spot--but not always. One DVD in particular has been hiccuping a lot.

Is this likely to be a problem with the DVD itself or with my computer's
hardware or software? I have no other device on which to test the DVDs.

Thank you!

Jo-Anne

Have you ever tried this program ? It has a couple
tests you can try.

ftp://ftp6.nero.com/tools/DiscSpeed.zip

I use an earlier version of that program.

This is a quality check of my Kaspersky AV disc, which
only has 200MB of data on the disc. The scan as a result,
only occupies a portion of the disc surface. This scan
is pretty good, as the error rate is in the 10's rather
than the 1000's.

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/4200/scanresult.gif

Drives (and test software), vary in what error parameters
they can measure and report. Some people keep specific models
of burners around, for their known measurement capabilities.
You'll notice my drive is only measuring C1 in that example.
I'm just happy it measures *something*. I used to have
a Liteon, and it had a few more options.

To measure a disc, you want a "raw" error measurement. The
thing is, even when you see thousands of errors in the scan,
the Reed Solomon error code corrects all of them. Eventually,
the drive has trouble tracking the groove on the disc, and
that leads to the drive becoming virtually unresponsive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Solomon

"The result is a CIRC that can completely correct error
bursts up to 4000 bits, or about 2.5 mm on the disc surface.
This code is so strong that most CD playback errors are almost
certainly caused by tracking errors that cause the laser to
jump track, not by uncorrectable error bursts."

They use a powerful error correcting code, to compensate for
the abuse the discs are subjected to.

*******

If you don't want to try that, you can also attempt
to copy the large files held in the video_ts folder,
over to your hard drive, then try and play the
content from there. At least, that works for
the home made DVDs I have here (I used DVD authoring
software to convert captured content from my WinTV
capture card, into discs). A file copied off there,
can be played from the hard drive.

If you're copying the entire contents of a dual layer
commercial disc, the player may takes its sweet time
doing the transfer. Without tricks, it'll run at 1x
read rate (as far as I know, this is called "rip-lock"
and is hated). If I switch over to booting up Linux, and
copy the same disc from there, it copies at the max media
rate (which doesn't happen to be much faster, but does
shave at least an hour off the transfer time).

Good luck,
Paul


Thank you for all the info, Paul! I'm overwhelmed--and not sure where to
start. If I can copy one DVD to my hard drive, I'll try that first.

Jo-Anne