DVD-R statment

MarkHastings · 05-23-2006, 11:59 AM

All, I work for a company that produces DVD-R's for clients. I have had people complain about these DVD's not working in certain players...

After troubleshooting, 99.9% of the time, it's related to a machine that isn't capable of playing DVD-R's or their software (in the computer) isn't set properly, etc. etc.

My boss is looking to come up with some sort of statement that details these 'issues' for clients to look over.

While I understand that DVD-R's are dye-burned as opposed to stamped, what other issues should I note in this documentation? Does anyone know of a blanket statement (concerning DVD-R's) that I could use?

Besides being compatible with DVD-R's, what else should I note in this document?

And ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Tekara · 05-23-2006, 12:46 PM

The biggest thing I would note now is the age of the player, it is rare for a current DVD-ROM or DVD player to not be able to recognize DVD-R media. The only times that the DVD-Rs that we turn out for clients in our office didn't work is when the player was a 1st or 2nd generation DVD deck.

MarkHastings · 05-23-2006, 02:30 PM

Yeah, but do the really cheap players have DVD-R capability? A co-worker had problems with one of those cheap VHS/DVD players. It was almost brand new, but didn't have -R capability.

Tekara · 05-23-2006, 02:39 PM

That is a good question, the only thing I can really say in regards to that is that I have one of those cheap players that I got from newegg as a freebie with my printer and I haven't had problems with it. However it is something that I could see as being a problem. . . but I'm not really sure how you could really get a client to distinguish that though.

Christ Reynolds · 05-23-2006, 08:01 PM

check out these links, they may not help you prepare a statement, but they could help identify a potential problem instead of a customer getting surprised that a disk doesnt work.

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia

CJ

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Rob_HD · 05-24-2006, 03:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MarkHastings

Yeah, but do the really cheap players have DVD-R capability? A co-worker had problems with one of those cheap VHS/DVD players. It was almost brand new, but didn't have -R capability.

The funny thing is, it's usually the cheap players that play everything, in my experience.

My Denon didn't like a lot of the discs I threw at it, but my 39 pound "Craptronix"-type player never hiccuped once. I wish I knew why

MarkHastings · 05-24-2006, 09:37 AM

The main problem I run into is, we use specialized media because we use a thermal printer and the only discs that work with the printer are made by the manufacturer, so we can't just use any brand.

We have a Rimage Disclab duplicator and we have to use Rimage approved media.

There isn't any documentation on thier media, so I'm kind of stuck as to it's 'playability'. So I have to create a general 'statement' - I guess just explaining that DVD-R's aren't 100% compaitible with all DVD players.

Now what about DVD players in computers? I assume most all players will play DVD-R's?

Jason Harbaugh · 05-24-2006, 10:55 AM

We do a lot of dvd duplication and come into the same problems as nearly everyone else. Playability still turns out to be a crapshoot. You can't even rely on the year the player was built. Like Rob, I have just a couple year old higher end DVD players that hate recordables, or only take +R. I have even older cheapo players that seem to play everything. It is incredibly frustrating for us and for clients. We don't have a written statement, but we do explain that should they have incompatibilities we have one other option, using +R and if that doesn't work there isn't much we can do.

Computer players are nearly always compatible.

Mark, how do you like your Rimage? We've looked at them a couple times.

MarkHastings · 05-24-2006, 04:29 PM

I have a love/hate relationship with the Rimage...

It's actually pretty awesome. The mechanics and automation are wonderful and the thermal prints are GORGEOUS! We have the lower end model, so we always have to swap out media (DVD and CD) and then tell the software which media is in the bin. The more expensive models have the ability to put both media (in 2 separate bins) and the machine picks what it needs, but I'm pretty happy with ours.

The only thing I am not thrilled with is, since it's all automation, it's quite finicky and there are a lot of variables that need to function together in order for things to go smoothly.

I find myself shutting everything down and rebooting whenever I run into a problem because it seems like once something goes wrong, you can't easily just fix the one area, you have to shut it all down and restart. But I guess that's not too big of a deal.

I guess the major thing has been support. Their support system isn't all that good, so whenever I run into a problem, I basically have to figure it out myself and that takes quite a while.

In fact, as far as the printer goes, I could NEVER get CMYK Tiffs to print correctly on it. We had a specialist come in to help and he recommended RGB BMP's - The printer is a CMYK thermal printer and I questioned why my CMYK TIFF's were worse than RGB BMP's. The guy was a bit stumped and said he would present it to the guys at Rimage and even talked about putting it in a white paper (or whatever).

So we have run into areas that we've had to resolve ourselves and being that the machine has a ton of parts and areas that could bring about issues, it's quite annoying at times.

But overall, I guess those issues are par for the course as the machine does do quite an excellent job.