I just bought a new Liteon SHW-160P6S and it burns dvd's great and they work perfectly when playing on my PC, but when I put them in my standalone samsung dvd player, they act weird. They play perfectly in the beginning and the end of all movies, but in the middle, the movie gets very jumpy for about a 10 minute period, up to the point where there is maybe one frame shown every minute with bits of audio playing intermittently.

I'm really confused what I should do because the main reason I got the dvd burner was to backup movies and if they have problems on my dvd burner I don't know what to do. Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks!

Usually playback problems are due to a low quality disc.

What discs are you using? What firmware is installed on your drive? At what speed are you burning these discs?

I am using Playo DVD+R's. I set Nero to just burn at "Max"

Not sure what firmware I have. I'll try to figure it out. Are those Playo's bad quality? I can't really return a DVD spindle if I have used them

The thing is is that they play fine on my computer, so I thought it might be a problem with my DVD player, not the discs. Am I making the wrong assumption?

Your problem is that you are using very low quality discs.

You can play these discs on your computer because the liteon is a good reader. Your standalone can be more picky about media.

My suggestion is to buy better media, like verbatim (beware: stay away from verbatim "Pearl White" series; these are low quality discs).

Well, after rebates, 60 of these DVDs costs my $2.98... But even with that you're saying I should return them? Why would the middle of the movies be messed up when the beginning and end are fine?

This is related on the amount of errors on the disc. Probably in the inner part of the disc there are fewer errors, so your standalone can read these discs easier.

If you can, I suggest to return these discs, changing with some quality media. Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden are the very best discs available in the market

To see how much errors there are on the burned discs you can do a quality test with cd-dvd speed.

You can read more here

Ok thanks, I will post a benchmark of a DVD I burned in a minute with CD-DVD speed.

The benchmark is not sufficient; you should post also the quality test. Remember to set speed of quality test at 4x, or the scan will be not reliable

Here is a benchmark, Ill do what you said right now as well.

Ok here is a disc quality test. What does this mean?

It means that there are a lot of errors. The scan is not a disaster, but could be better.

Probably your standalone is rather picky, or maybe it can't read +R discs. You can improve compatibility burning these discs @12x and also changing bitsetting as ROM.

You can read more about scan interpretation here and also in this subforum

Hmm, ok I will burn at 12x from now on. Also, what is bitsetting?

Ok, so will my burner automatically keep it set as DVD-ROM after I reboot or will I have to always set that? Does setting it in CD-DVD Speed change it for all burning programs or just the actual test? Thanks so much for your help!

Actually in drive settings it says the book type is DVD+R, but the disc setting is set to DVD-ROM. I should be changing the burner setting right?

You're welcome

The change of booktype is done on the burner, not in the burning software. You can make the change of booktype temporary or definitive until you want to change it again.

I must confess that I don't know if the change done with cd-dvd speed is temporary or not. To be sure, you can use the official liteon tool, that allow you to choose how do you want to change bitsetting.

You can find it here (it's free).

Checking the "save" option, the change will remain also after a reboot.

NOw after seeing the tests, do you still say I should get new media? Id really rather not, but if makes a huge difference I will

This is a verbatim disc. As you can see, mediacode is the same, but results are very different