I've owned the Panasonic DMR-E85H since January and am now having problems finalizing my DVDs. I must have finalized about 50+ on various brands from Panasonic, CompuUSA, Sony, and Verbatim since I've owned it. Also, I tend to do mostly Flex Recording (FR) and High Speed. My DVD-R HD normally is about 75% full when burning.
For some reason, I can't finalize discs anymore. The machine starts to, them says finalizing failed with no further explanation. It doesn't matter how large the file is that I am recording to.
If the unit is still under warranty then take it to a service center, otherwise, the units lens may be really dirty; not with just dust, but with solid deposits that require a manual cleaning with a Q-tip and cleaner. One of my recorders requires constant cleaning but afterwards always works fine again.
I appreciate the advice and will try the cleaning and the machine is still under warranty. I have recently been able to get some discs to finalize. It seems purely random. Sometimes I have 4 hrs of content that I've burned using FR and it can finalize just fine. Other times, there's just a 1 hr show I'm trying to finalize and the player just quits on me and goes into self check mode. I don't get any U99 codes or anything, just finalizing failed or "there was an error, or replace the disk".
thanks for the ISO buster tip. I'll look into it. To answer your other question, I have experimented with putting back in the DVD to try and finalize again. I've got about 10 DVDs I've tried and have a 30% success rate at getting the DVD to finalize. The other times, the whole machine just turns off, resets, and goes into self start mode. What I have noticed is that the DVDs that I tried to finalize again have a single one hour TV show on them and the other 70% that failed have two hours or more.
