Earlier, I wrote about the relatively rare and elusive DVD-Rs that carried the VANGUARD media identifier. One variant of these was sold under the “as seen on www.dvd-recordable.org” branding, named “Printable.1“. The donor of the disc, pepst, had the following to say about those discs:

Under the brand name http://www.dvd-recordable.org, the worst and least compatible media from obscure small Asian producers were sold at the beginning of the DVDR boom (turn of 2003-2004). I still have a few other discs at home (mostly without MID codes), and virtually no drive was able to write them in readable quality.

As it turns out, pepst has also donated some of those other discs – in this case, Printable.2. I received a total of seven samples, in various conditions.

The Disc

At the beginning of the DVD-R “boom”, my experience was that branded discs were expensive and less reputable “generic” brand discs often sold much more cheaply with light dye colour, varying levels of write and read compatibility and sometimes with physical defects such as unbalance, poor adhesive distribution or even crinkly printable coatings. When I had my first DVD recorder, I recall the “no brand” AML001 discs cost me about AU$1.38 each in 25 piece spindles, while the branded stuff was closer to AU$3-4 a disc, even in bulk. The choice to go with no-brand seemed logical, as my BenQ DW400A managed to eat them up with no trouble (albeit, I had no drive to actually scan and confirm).

While I’ve never met this brand of media prior to this donation, I already can feel some of the era coming back to me – just look at the spotty, mottled printable coating on this disc. I suspect this isn’t caused by storage but simply a poor printable coating.

Unlike most of the cheaper discs of the era that I’ve held, this one has silvering right into the inner clamping area. This was perhaps something that some manufacturers may have avoided to save on cost. But this isn’t even – there’s some signs to suggest the adhesive isn’t quite spread properly around the middle of the disc. The dye colour is light purple – the scanner doesn’t give a good impression, so I’ll move over to the camera shots.

A close-up of the centre ring. The stamper laser marking is seen from the back – DVD-R 4.7GB 4X 004.

The camera shows a more true-to-life colour of the underside.

A closer look at the stamper code – the text is rather tall and the mark is thin, not quite perfect in terms of its concentric alignment.

Looking through all the samples, there was one disc with a much thinner, smaller text code ending in 008 rather than 004.

The Media Code Block dump is as follows:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-R:NO_ID_PRESENT]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disc & Book Type :       [DVD-R] - [DVD-R]
Manufacturer Name :      [Manufacturer Not Found In Database]
Manufacturer ID :        [Not Present On Disc]
Blank Disc Capacity :    [2,298,496 Sectors = 4.71 GB (4.38 GiB)]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Media Code'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'Media Code'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 0Eh - Pre-Recorded Information In Lead-In
0000 : 01 40 c1 fd 9e d8 52 00  02 87 0e 13 87 88 80 00   [email protected].........
0010 : 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................
0020 : 05 88 80 00 00 00 01 00  06 0b 0f 11 86 67 80 00   .............g..
0030 : 07 88 80 00 00 00 00 00  08 01 1b 0b 0f 08 08 00   ................
0040 : 09 55 09 10 0b 90 88 00  0a 80 88 80 88 80 10 00   .U..............
0050 : 0b 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  0c 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................
0060 : 0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00                     ..........

** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Control Data Zone'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'CDZ'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 10h - Physical Format Information Of Control Data Zone
0000 : 25 0f 02 00 00 03 00 00  00 26 12 7f 00 00 00 00   %........&......
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ DVD Identifier V5.2.0 - http://DVD.Identifier.CDfreaks.com ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now that’s unusual. A disc with no media ID at all! The bytes are null. While this is a possibility that is allowed, most media have a media ID to allow for drives to identify them and apply the best recording strategy (assuming it has been tested during drive development and the correct values embedded into the firmware). Without this, the drive is left to either use defaults or the values embedded into the disc itself which can result in unpredictable speed limitations on some drives, poor write quality and very inconsistent results. **No serious reputable manufacturer would want that! **The only instance I can think of handling media with no ID is for very early media – e.g. the Maxell authoring DVD-R.

The Problems

Before testing, I’ve learned that it’s a good idea to examine the media carefully …

Turns out, these discs aren’t so healthy. Look closely and there’s quite a few pinprick holes along with reflective layer oxidation starting at the outer edge – likely a manufacturing (i.e not sealed well to the edge) or handling induced (i.e. impact damage to the edge of the disc) issue.

Another sample had a much bigger singular hole in the reflective layer with a somewhat lighter region around it, suggesting it had been perhaps corroded some of the reflective layer around what might have initially been a pin-prick hole.

One sample had a crack in the central hub in one of the two substrate layers. While it probably wouldn’t fail immediately, damage like this can escalate to disc-shattering incidents in high-speed drives – generally speaking, you’re warned to not use such discs.

This disc is a good example of adhesive distribution issues – the glue seems to have seeped into the inner ring at around the 10-o’clock position, reaching right into the spindle hole, but leaving a bit of an adhesive void opposite from 12 to 4-o’clock visible as a subtle change in the reflective silvered hub portion. Imperfect construction was a symptom of such low-cost generic discs which often resulted in warpage and imbalance.

This one had another trick up its sleeve, perhaps enhanced by age. The first one I tried to burn actually caused a write error (that was recoverable with a retry) seemingly because its printable layer started to peel off with the pressure of the airflow in the drive and then distributed itself as dust all over the insides. That stuff is hard to remove and fouls the lubrication of the drive’s seek motor and tray too. Eugh.

Test Results

Nevertheless, I managed three burns – will any of them be good, or even successful?

Sample 1

Media without an ID is rather tricky to handle. BenQ’s QSuite tells me that the DW1640 doesn’t have an entry for this media type in its table – i.e. it is not supported. By default, this means the DW1640 will use SolidBurn, an adaptive learning strategy technique to try and ensure the best burn quality – you can think of this as W-OPC on steroids.

Running the TE/FE test on this sample seemed to show high TE even at a tame speed like 4x. This is not a good sign, but in itself, doesn’t necessarily disqualify this media entirely.

The first attempted write at 4x was not encouraging. Write Error. Damn.

Retrying the same disc managed to coax it into burning. There’s a lot of W-OPC dips, not unexpected as the drive is “learning” the media. Often the first write isn’t necessarily the best, but as I don’t have many usable samples, it wouldn’t make sense to burn a series either – so whatever the result is will have to be the result we take.

The result? Failure to read from about 3GB onwards, but with errors and dips much earlier. The quality scan shows values for PIE off the charts even though PIFs were initially okay and jitter was generally borderline. The disc got so bad that the jitter curve broke and scan simply failed.

The DH16A6L is a bit of a champion reader – it managed to almost read it all out except for the end. The scan curves suggest bad jitter and high PIEs throughout with PIFs escalating towards the end.

The SHM-165P6S indicates the PIF is bad all-round, which is different.

It does concur that the jitter is high and poor – the timing diagram shows just a lot of noise meaning that there isn’t a clear distinction between the lengths of pits and lands – look at the clump around 14T and how every peak merges into each other and the tail for 3T stretches much shorter. A horrific result, so bad that I couldn’t coax this drive into running a beta scan on the disc – it simply hung the drive until it dropped off the bus entirely.

After the burn, the SoldBurn EEPROM table has four entries – no entry for this “all-null” MID.

But somehow the front page now says this media is *Supported. ***I suppose this means burning this media had a confusing effect on the drive. Perhaps they didn’t account for an all-null media code entry in the SolidBurn table.

Sample 2

The quality of the second disc doesn’t appear quite right. That level of TE at 4x is extreme and even FE is suffering. I don’t expect a good result here. For this second sample, I let my latest Pioneer BDR-X13JBK give it a try – it’s known to be a bit adaptive too.

It managed a 4x burn with two deeper dips – not unusual for this drive. I decided not to do a TRT in the drive to save the possibility of powder-coating the insides with scraps of flaked-off printable coating. It was so weakly clinging on that sticking a piece of sticky tape on it was enough to pull it right off the disc.

No dice – can’t read it fully on the DW1640 but it is more stable except for the dip near 1.5GB. The end is still horrible, as is the PIE rates. Jitter is slightly worse.

The DH16A6L is a super-star – it read the burn back completely, despite needing to step-back in speed towards the end. The fact it even read seems to be a miracle.

The SHM-165P6S seems to have a bit of a different trend, indicating high errors on the inside and outside, contrary to the others. Regardless, it never really fell within the acceptable boundaries for error.

This drive saw the jitter as high, but improving until the very end when it rose again. The peak shift for pits is quite concerning. It suggests this was not the right strategy to be using with the disc – the pulse timings are off.

The beta curve shows it being a bit high, later approaching limit high but being trimmed back into specifications by the drive. It’s not a good result overall.

Sample 3

This disc too did not seem to be healthy. The TE, especially, was peaky but now in the middle of the disc. After some checks, I discovered holes in the reflective layer (covered earlier), so this disc was disqualified from testing.

Sample 4

This one was the odd-one-out with the smaller stamping code ending in “008”.

Compared to the others, this one could be considered somewhat superior despite some individual TE spikes and a FE spike at the end.

For this disc, my trusty Pioneer DVR-111L got the honours. While a 4x write was selected, at 1.5GB, the drive decided to fall-back to 2x writing – the W-OPC likely detected poor write quality.

On the DW1640, it wasn’t readable all the way through, but it was smooth up to about 2.8GB. The PIE values looked fine up to 1.5GB – the fall back seems to have worsened things. The jitter was surprisingly low at the beginning too, but the PIF rate seems to have “floored” at a somewhat high value. The disc only got worse as the burn progressed, rapidly increasing in error past 4GB.

The DH16A6L didn’t manage to read this one cleanly and had issues mid-way too. The jitter graph is completely different, but the error trends are still consistent.

In this case, the SHM-165P6S also seems to be somewhat in agreement.

It seems to suggest jitter as being relatively consistent throughout. The peak alignment is better, although longer pits still seem to be problematic, but the spread is quite poor.

In this case, beta started off low, which actually resulted in the better error rates. When the fall-back occurred, the beta returned to a more desirable near-zero condition, but the error rates got worse. Perhaps there is some dye where having a bias (imbalance) in the signal somehow improves error rates? Or perhaps it’s another factor completely unseen …

Conclusion

To meet a disc without a media ID is pretty rare, but it was an occurrence during the early days of DVD recording. Aside from early media, such generic media by unknown manufacturers may carry no media ID (instead of carrying test IDs, obscure IDs or “borrowing” someone else’s) – a fact that I had perhaps forgotten until encountering this disc (thanks to pepst). It has much of the foibles of such media which include poor manufacturing (i.e. reflective layer holes, edge rot, adhesive issues) and rather unfortunately, wasn’t able to turn in a good burn despite trying my best. Perhaps the media’s dye layer had degraded as well over time, but I suspect they simply never were reliable to begin with …