Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

I purchased a bluray duplicator from CDROMTOGO.COM that will not burn a good disc. It's essentially an $800 paperweight. I've tried three brands of media, none of which work any better. My discs come out pixellated and jumpy, and I'm back to burning on my PC.

What hardware do use for duplicating Blurays? Anyone have a favorite brand of duplicator?

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

UDF 2.50? I mean yes it could be the media, but I've used some pretty cheep ones that worked fine. Verbatim or Sony is a safe bet.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

CDROM2GO use drives from LG. Look for towers with Pioneer or Plextor drives.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

You know Juris, I never have liked LG drives, and I appreciate that you pointed this out. I have a Pioneer burner in my workstation and it's performed flawlessly.

I'm in the process of selecting bluray burners to add to my workstation. Apparently Nero can burn mulitiple copies simutaneously, and if my experiment works, I will use my PC as a duplicator, maybe with three burners. I don't burn a large quantity of discs, usually three at a time, but it's enough that I don't want to burn them one at a time.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

Juris,

It's not that LG burners do a poor job of burning BD-R discs (in fact, they do a good job when used correctly); it's just that prosumer disc duplicators have little to no control whatsoever over the burning speed selection. Many LG burners support BD-R burn speeds that are far faster than the media's maximum official supported burn speed with some MIDs (Media Identification codes). In other words, if a media is officially listed by its distributor as supporting a burn speed up to 6x, the duplicators with LG burners (since they will default to maximum speed due to the lack of control in these duplicators) will try to burn that disc at 12x or even 14x. This will cause playability issues.

Pioneer and Plextor BD burners, on the other hand, usually restrict their firmware to the official maximum burn speeds for every given media code.

And burning BD-Rs is one thing. Pioneer's DVD burners, on the other hand, do not do a good job of burning single-layer DVD+R discs when it comes to compatibility with older or cheaper set-top DVD players: They do not support bitsetting of such media to DVD-ROM. But that's another story, and I cannot confirm the same thing with Pioneer's BD-R/RE burners (since I have never used one).

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

Randall, in my case I do have speed selection on the duplicator tower, and it's set to 1. I have also set the read speed to 1, which is stupid slow.

Randall, it occurred to me I could take out a burner from the tower and check/update it's firmware. I'm at a loss otherwise. Customer support from cdromtogo is very very poor. It has been the worst customer experience I've had online, and I've had plenty of experience. I estimate I've spend over $50-60K on PC related gear in over 10 years, and I've obviously been very spoiled by B&H and Newegg. CDromtogo is too small of a company to justify such impersonal and inept service.

What you point out about the speed control of LG burners might be why I used to have issues with LG burners, because as you say, they did burn faster than the stated speed of the media.

I had originally wanted to build my own dup tower, but was too stressed out at the time to think clearly, I just wanted something immediately that worked.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

Jeff,

Thanks for the correction (in the case of your particular duplicator). Lousy customer support is one of many things holding this company back. And the "1" setting on the burn speed will try to burn that disc at 1x, with an increased risk of high jitter in burns (and 1x is slower than the LG firmware's minimum supported write speed of 2x with this media). This is because a spindle that operates at slower than the motor's rated minimum speed will not spin as stably as one that spins at the correct speed.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

Yes, Jeff, I only use DVD-R discs with Pioneer DVD burner.

I had an old Lite-On BD burner, which was not too good, but now I am using a Pioner BDR-208DBK.
My experience is that the Pioneer and Plextor devices work much longer than others.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

Randall, I had been burning at 2X, the only other option, until yesterday, so I can't blame the 1x speed for my previous bad burns. This is important info about the burn speed. After checking out the firmware on drives, I'll change the burn speed back to 2x.

If nothing else I have an expensive DVD duplicator, as it burns DVDs just fine.

I will also install my pioneer in the duplicator and see if it does any better. I don't know if the burner would be incompatible with the board in the duplicator, but it won't hurt to try it, and I somehow doubt the board will know one burner from another, but I truly don't know.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

Juris, I too found that my old LG drives did not last long, but they were very inexpensive also. I guess I got what I paid for.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

It's the burners causing the issue, during the copying/reading of the original disc. The firmware update is supposed to fix it, we'll see.

Re: Duplicator issues, what to you use?
 

My LG drives are bad. They play, burn fine, but during the reading/copying process they produce an image that is pixellated and jumpy after burning. I've tried the burners on my PC to isolate issue. When I copy the disc with a Pioneer bluray player, I can burn with the LG and it's fine, but vice versa it is not.

The firmware update is supposed to address readability of blurays, but obviously it doesn't work for my purposes.

I imagine there are few enough people that copy blurays that this issue is not a huge one for LG.