Daily Limit for Burned Dvds?

[DaisyChain]

Hi;

I don't burn dvds often at all, actually. So yesterday, I decided to get caught up, and burnt several.

Well it suddenly quit working. Similar to the way it did after the controversial "tivo update" from some months ago. (That was fixed by another update)

So, what's going on? There's been a few lineup changes and 'updates' recently... did one of those make it so there's a limit on how many Dvds will burn per day? It won't burn any today, either.

I did nothing different in between discs. It's the same pack of discs, too. It just suddenly quit burning. Nothing saves and then it tells me the save failed. There's no real reason given for it. Nothing happened - it just suddenly stopped burning Dvds. I have three or four 'coasters', now.

Any tips?

[ashu]

No conspiracy theory there. This is a PC DVD burnring drive, and those frequently fail when the laser is overused.

This has been my theory all along, and you're helping my case. I have long maintained that most DVD burning failures were a result of heavy use. Burners (the NEC drives themselves) are cheap and can't handle it.

[megazone]

Actually when these failures happen a reboot often 'fixes' it. So I suspect something in the software gets wedged and won't reset itself.

[funtoupgrade]

Make and model number?

[wscannell]

This has happened several times on my Humax DRT800. It usually starts with a bad burn - (throw the disc away). Then it does not burn at all. Reboot and all is well. It always seems to happen after a number of DVDs are burned in the same day.

[DaisyChain]

Toshiba, I don't know the model number offhand.

Would more than 2 discs per day be considered "heavy" usage?! Granted that one time I was getting caught up and clearing out the 'saves' on the Tivo to make room - so I burned several in a day.

Then it was fine again for a while... and NOW, if I do more than two a day, it's messed up for a good week or more after that. I did a Restart twice and it did not help either time.

8 coasters in the past 2 days! Something's wrong.

It isn't even an old unit - about a year old, at most? I think? And if you total all the burns there have not been that many. Surely it was made to do this anyway?! Not to make coasters...

[megazone]

I've done far more than 2 a day at times on my Pioneer, when I was dumping a series to disc.

[ashu]

Hmm, I'm always a very light usage burner. Helps that I have two PCs capable of burning, and a Toshiba TiVo burner, and a Humax burner. All the drives are essentially the same - NEC/Pioneer clones. All working fine so far. So much for my own 'overuse' hypothesis.

[jkovach]

I've found that if the hard drive in your Tivo is going bad, any shows that are recorded on a bad spot (evidenced by pixelation, sound going out for a few seconds, etc.) will not successfully burn to DVD.

Prior to replacing my failing hard drive, I determined which shows I could salvage by first trying to burn them (one at a time) to DVD-RW. Those that were successful burned to DVD-R with no difficulty. Those that would not burn to DVD-RW would also turn DVD-R disks into coasters.