I got a 16X10X40 CD burner. I burnt a copy of VCD which can be played by my DVD player to a 24X CD-R. The copy can only be played by my computer but not my DVD player. Is it the speed caused the problem?

-- Cynthia Zheng (jzheng01@hotmail.com), January 25, 2002

Answers

It's not the speed of the burn, it's a problem with your DVD player. Please see my response to your previous post which explains the situation in some detail.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 25, 2002.

Yes.

CDs rely on a huge amount of error detection, and error correction. See http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdrom/95x8.htm . VCDs use Mode 2, Form 1 for filesystem type data (that has 276 bytes of ECC per sector, and 4 bytes of error detection); and Mode 2 Form 2 for the MPEG data, (0 bytes of ECC, 4 bytes of error detection). Which means that VCD video is relying only on the media level ECC for integrity. The faster you burn a CD, the less sharp the edges of the "pits" will be, which increases the probability of an error.

"Measure twice, cut once."

Burn at 2 speed. You can wait 30 minutes.

-C

-- Conor McCarthy (conormc@ucd.ie), January 31, 2002.

Things have changed. Today's faster media is generally not designed to be burned at such slow speeds. It's asking to much to have a disc that burns well at 40x to also burn at 1 or 2x. The question of burning speed is always an issue of the drive and the media. The more stable dyes appear not to burn well at low speeds.

So run the tests on your hardware and software to see what burn speeds work. Always burn VCD and CD audio at less than the least of (system capability, media capability, drive write capability). As a rule, that's less than your max but at least 8x with today's faster media.

If possible, read the image to your disc drive then burn.

That burn at 1x stuff was always an urban myth

-- buzzy (notmy@realmail.invalid), January 31, 2003.

The speed at which you burn your CD's should never matter with today's media and burners. I burn VERY consistently at 32x, whether it be data, audio, vcd, etc... Now, keep in mind that it is worth the extra few dollars to get the name-brand media. I find that Princo CDR's are very good quality and I swear by them. The size of the "pits" doesn't change if you burn at a faster speed, the media and burner are made for this. If you are having trouble reading the CD, by all means - try burning at a slower speed. It may be that your burner or software, etc... isn't burning 100% correctly, but that seems illogical (captain).

-- Mr. Man (foo@bar.com), April 05, 2003.

In case of copied VCD playing on a standalone DVD player, its most likely that the player doesn't support reading CD-R/W. The writting speed has nothing to do with that, unless you burnt it with speed higher than the one declared on the media, or you used overburning. But, in this case, written CD would probably also be unreadable on the computer CD reader. Writting at low speed is a myth - quality of the burner and media are important and responsible for CD readability.

-- Zdravko Skeledzic (zdravkos@gmx.net), April 06, 2004.