As well all rely so heavily on the results of KProbe to tell us whether our burners are working correctly it needs to be reliable.
However, I wonder at the results, after scanning the same disc five times in a row and getting five different results, results that vary from "acceptable" to what you might think is "unreadable"?
It makes me think about all the discs I have chucked out on the basis of these scans . . .
Would anyone care to share their thoughts on this subject?

I think one fact is the temperature when you do the scans i would say if you make 5 scans right after another then it gives worser results.
So far i had only a few coasters and these coaesters had splendid kprobe results but didnt read or you couldn copy a thing thats probably because nero couldnt get past the lead in then it got an error and burned the disc to the end lol.
I think Kprobe is reliable but you shouldnt bet on it and use a mix out of different things.

Kprobe CD/DVD Speed and the simplest thing copy a DVD to the HD if you think something smells fishy.

Oh and a surface scan is a good thing too.

It sure can take time to check but i check the disc better then to get one day a "hidden" faulty disc.

I am far from being an expert, but have become less and less "comfortable" with Kprobe scanning, especially at the 4x speed which does not seem to show up defects that 8x scanning reveals.
I now use Nero speedscan as the better indicator of a readable burn. I wonder also what advantages Kprobe has over Nero's burn quality testing?
It surely gets tiresome testing everything twice or more

Hi there,
I will share my thoughts and limited experience with this Litey 811s :-)

In my case I scan using both Kprobe2.* and Nero CD/DVD speed 3.* The results are fairly similar, just taking care of basic things like this:

(a) Compare PI/PIF scans using same DVD reader (preferably DVD burner) and same read speed (eg, 4x)
(b) Do not load the CPU with other running applications / processes while scanning. This is specially true under old OS like Win98se.
(c) Use recent Kprobe or Nero CD Speed version releases and take note of the final sampling count. On entire DVD disc, it should be 90.000 - 130.000. If you get low sampling counts... well, discard that PI/PIF scanning: probably, you run the scan while other processes (eg, antivirus) were running....
(d) Other factors: stable Hw/Sw (power supply, 'taskbar' processes... )

Sure I forget something; by the moment, I hope this helps,

Additional note:

If you want to have a better idea of the readability of a particular disc, scan it at several speeds and several DVD drive units if available. For example, scan @4x could be good [PI/PIF], but scanning at higher speeds could reveal risky zones of your disc, showing mountain PIF values... A well burned disc would show slight or moderate higher PI/PIF values at higher speeds, but not rocketed values...

For that purpose I use:
- Liteon LDW-811s (dvd burner, 'PI/PIF able')
- Liteon SOHC-5232K (not dvd burner, but 'PI/PIF able'). Read at higher speeds

Particularly, I trust more PI/PIF of the 5232K unit, despite the fact it's not a DVD burner....

With Nero CD Speed and *any* DVD drive, you can do a transfer speed test or a simply scandisc [green / red sectors]; cross your fingers to get only green sectors

I sometimes ran KProbe on multiple drives at once. The results didn't vary much.

This topic has been discussed many times, with the same results each time. At the bottom of this new media testing forum, set the forum to display all the threads from "the beginning" (instead of just the past 30 days)... and you'll see that there are already a lot of threads about this. (this only works because this subforum is new and thus there aren't that many threads yet )

(actually, I didn't realize just how many times this has been discussed until just now... hehe)