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do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
A month or so ago my daughter bought me six ten-packs of
DVD-Rs from Tesco because they were cheap. I hasten to add that this was well before their blasphemous Christmas ads. I've just burned a couple of them with Toast Titanium and they are rubbish. Looking at the packaging, they were made in China apparently in 2014.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
That's not the answer, I just burned it to a high quality DVD with the same result.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Euan Williams
If you leave them exposed to bright light, especially sunlight, then probably yes.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
I'd believe anything of Tesco!

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Drew McFarlane
When I record a film or whatever on my Panasonic DVD recorder to a DVD–R, I have to "Finalise" the DVD before I am able to watch the recording.

I don't know whither you would have to do the same Eric.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Hi Drew, I think that must be peculiar to your DVD recorder, the discs play but duff quality.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Tony Still
I assume that your "duff quality" is markedly worse that the original video file. If it is just poor video or audio quality, it's unlikely to be the disks. If you are seeing jumps and pixelation, freezing of all or part of the screen and so on (digital artefacts) then it could be the disks.

For the first case, I would start by looking at your chain of actions to create the disk image from the original video and see if any step is wrongly set to a small resolution or similar.


BTW, do try the DVD on a TV - they always look quite poor when viewed on a computer at any reasonable size.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Hi Tony, yes, its much worse, but its not the discs. When I burn them with Burn the quality is much better than with Toast 9. This is when played on a TV.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Tony Still
So maybe there's a setting wrong in Toast somewhere? I have never used it so can't suggest where to look but Resolution might be a good clue.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Derek Wright
We have used old CDs as bird scarers by stringing them over the kitchen garden to twist around in the breeze, the light flashes on them and keeps the birds off the plants.

Now back to the topic, commercially produced CDs ie proper CDs that you spent real money on did not deteriorate, they could be played after several months in bird scarer mode, the recordable CDs would after a short period have the silver coat separate from the plastic disk and so would be unusable apart from any plastic disk role, eg spacers under table legs, beer mats etc.

Which is why I never trust recordable CDs / DVDs as a long term data storage media.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Tony, the only setting I can find in the prefs is 'enable dithering', and it is checked. I'm sure I knew what that meant years ago but I've forgotten it. My main concern is the quality of the text on-screen.
Derek, as bird scarers they would be excellent. I'm sure they're OK, and I've used about twenty of them already trying to get it right, but the discs are obviously not the problem.
I may try a Plan B.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
I stopped all that dithering and if anything the result is worse.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Tony Still
Yes, dithering ought to improve quality if anything but I think it's probably a bad sign that it's making any difference at all.

The only thing I can think of is to ensure that everywhere you are preparing/including graphics, particularly if they include text, that you ensure their resolution is higher than your final video needs. That way, they get downscaled which generally preserves or improves quality rather than the reverse. If your text is embedded in images then try producing all your graphics at exactly twice the video resolution (I think it's 720x576 for PAL DVD, SD of course).

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
This posting of the 18th Jan resulted from my post of the 14th Jan, and I'm in danger of confusing myself. The original problem has been solved. For a DVD player to a widescreen TV I made the image a 1240mm x 560mm .png, having included a 60mm black band either side of the image, so that part of the image did not disappear under the frame of the TV screen. This is readable from the other side of the living room, and was burned with Burn as a DVD. This gives a terrible result when viewed on a Mac. If I treat the DVD as if it was a floppy disc however, it will be perfect on a Mac and on a PC, but crap on a television. All this has taught me that I've been barking up the wrong tree, and that the only practicable way to do it is to forget discs and make the thing downloadable from the website, for a small and very reasonable fee. I shall be engaging my entire brain to think about this.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Tony Still
For the DVD Video (DVD player) images, you need to be thinking in pixels, not physical sizes (millimetres). The missing link, perhaps not set-up correctly in Toast or whatever, is the ppi: pixels per inch (sorry, we don't do metric in this case).

Ideally set the size in pixels, I quoted the sizes above. If you have to set a physical size, set it (or calculate it) in inches. Then look for a ppi or dpi setting (same thing for this purpose) and set that so that the size in inches times the ppi is the required number of pixels.

...Or go your alternative route. Best of luck either way.

Re: do blank DVDs deteriorate?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Thanks Tony, I'll look into that.
 
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