Hi, I just bought my first DVD burner: the SOHW-812S, so I'm all new to this.

I'm having a little trouble with the media I'm using. I have a 25pck spindle of Memorex Discs. Here is how Smartburn identifies them:
Disc MID = 43 4D 43 20 4D 41 (CMC MA)
Disc TID = 47 2E 20 41 46 31 (G. AF1)
Nominal Capacity = 4.08GB
Manufacturer Maybe = CMC Magnetics Corporation
SMART-BURN Speed Limit = 4.0X (Write)

I made a backup of one of my PS2 games and then tried to verify the writting with Kprobe 2. The test would lockup at 95%. Then I created a DVD and put a few movies on there. I tested it out and I got 67PI errors and 3.93PO errors. The disk was virtually error free till the last quarter of the test, and then the errors skyrocketed. I tried to run the disk through a Nero speed check, but it failed towards the end.

So I downloaded the latest firmware and flashed my drive. I then tried to burn a new DVD at 2x. And now everything looks good. 7.63PI and 0.01PO

Do you think I had those 2 coasters because of the old firmware, or because I was writting the disk at 2x?

Here are my first readings with the old firmware and writting at 4x:


And here is the new firmware and writting at 2x:

speed: 4x please

To be specific - Virwar indeed meant the scanning speed in K-Probe should be set to 4X and not to Max!

a few suggestions

1) might want to check out the media forum

2) find out what drive your PS has and also bookmark the discs to ROM

3) your last burn looks fine. if you right click on the graphs after running the scans you can remove the single sector spikes.


that scan is actually probably fine but my guess is your player is locked down and will not play +R unless bookmarked.

good luck

The media I was using is DVD-R. So I was dissapointed when I realized I couldn't bookmark it. But I'll try to scan at 4x.

wierd my cmc f1's are + dics



oh wait yours are AF1 and mine are F01... now it all falls into place

So how come you shouldnt read higher than 4? Isn't that unrealistic, cuz when it's in a DVD player it might go higher than 4.

Comparison purposes.

Scan at whatever speed you want, just don't expect to be able to compare them to scans here or for us to be able to read them.

Mmm not good results for a CMC MAGF01 ... my 811@HS0Q does much better. If I were you, I'd upgrade to 811...

1) Higher speeds will generally cause higher error rates than 1x.
4x is used cos no-one wants to take 2hrs to read a disc

2) 4x will provide a constant linear velocity of the disc, within the realm of all dvdwriters.

3) Because everyone scans at 4x. Scanning at 1x will likely cause lower error rates, but if everyone scanned at 1x it would show low error rates. You need to scan at 4x or you're results will be invalid in comparison to everyone elses scans.

4) DVDROM's in PC's will often read DVDR's at 4x or higher. A 4x scans gives expected results for PC DVDROM's.


Standalone DVD players have no need to read a dvd faster than 2x. Most won't even play them faster than 1x, except when fast forwarding. But then ffwd only plays 2-4 frames per second anyway

thibouille, with my new firmware and scanning at 4x I got better results: PI: 7.63 & PO: 0.01. And when I did Nero disk speed test, the curve was very smooth.

But my XBox and PS2 still have problems reading the disk. Is this only caused by the booktype being DVD-R?

Most likely
Those PI/PO averages are excellent!
Burn a DVD+R disc bitset to DVD-ROM and try it on your PS2/Xbox.

Yeah, some console drives (they are not always the same, there are different brands) do not read -r/+r very well.

Bitsetting almost always help. You have nothing to lose, so I'd try if I were you.

Hey, so I went to CompUSA to buy some DVD+R discs. I wanted to get some Memorex discs, but I found some CompUSA branded discs for half the price. I thought they would be bad quality (and I would return them later) but they ended up being better than the Memorex discs.



However, I didn't manage to change the booktype. I downloaded the program from the LiteOn website and changed it to DVD-ROM and then loaded Nero Burning ROM (while the bootype program was still open) and burnt my DVD. But once it was done I queried my drive and it was recognized as a DVD+R. What went wrong? Does Nero not support the booktype feature?

Nice Scan... It´s "all" about media.

Strange, bitsetting utility not working. To my knowledge it should be fully supported in latest firmware. Try to d/l new copy. And the booktype is set to drive, burning software has nothing to do with this.

BTW, you can also try this TOOL

Oops, I think the disc was changed aftert all. The BookType program tells me the "Current Disc Type" is DVD+R and the "Change BookType to" is DVD-ROM. So it's kind of ambiguous. But I downlaoded the DVDInfoPro program and it tells me my booktype is DVD-ROM. I tried my DVD in my Xbox and it runs very well. Thanks all.

might also want to look into the auto bitsetter or the firmware bitset hack to automatically have it set to -rom from now on when burning+r