Originally posted by JoeRyan: When you say the Verbatim DVD+R DL with the altered book type "don't play," do you mean that the players will fail to recognize the disc? Or do they fail to go beyond the menu? Or do they just fail to make the transition jump? I can understand how they would not make the transition, but there is something wrong if they cannot even show the menu or move to chapter one.
the player is not recognizing the disc, period. it says something to the effect of "disc type error" and promptly ejects it.
Same here. Sony cannot read disc at all and displays a "Cannot Play Disc" message on the DVD Display. So, if there are older players that won't play the Verbatim DVD + DL booktyped to DVD-Rom and it appears that older Sony players aren't the only ones that won't read a quality Verbatim booktyped DL disc then to me it appears that booktyping isn't all that its cracked up to be. To me it is a useless feature and now I know why quality NEC burners never felt the need to include this in their equiptment. Yes, I even tried to upgrade firmware on one of my NEC burners to Liggy's aftermarket booktyping firmware and it too proved useless in playing quality dual layered discs booktyped to DVD-Rom in my older Sony DVD player.
This sounds to me to be a misreading of the DVD Forum specifications in the firmware of the players. They are seeing that the recordable discs have an ADIP section but also include the DVD-ROM identification according to the rule book. That combination is not supposed to happen according to the rule book, but that does not mean that a drive should prevent reading of the disc unless one misinterprets the specifications. The only solution (unless the companies have issued firmware updates--very unlikely since that would require inserting a recorded disc from a download or a CD-ROM manufactured and mailed out to the customer) is to record the Verbatim DL discs without falsifying the book type. Falsifying the book type was the only way in the past to get DVD+R discs to play on early Panasonic DVD drives/players/recorders.
Changing the book type does work in most cases, but these cases are examples where it actually fails to work at all. That is partly because the specifications are written in English by committees of engineers who were not literary majors in school and most of whom are not native English speakers. Language/committees/engineers--you can see the compounding of problems! The most capable of them write the specs; the others write the manuals. It is very easy to misinterpret what is written.
My brother has 2 Sony players, one a set top and the other a portable. The set top would not play any of my burned disks, either -Rs, -R DLs, or Book-typed +Rs, or +R DLs. They either skipped badly, pixelated badly, froze or weren't recognized.
His portable Sony on the other hand would play them all with no problems.
Is it possible Sony has tightened up their specs on jitter (wobble, vibration?) on their set tops but left their portables looser because of stability?
Also, Sony is very aggresive on pirating and this could be another way for them to discourage it(but of course, they still sell burners so not to lose out on the sales).
The set top and the portable probably have different controllers, firmware, and decoders as well as optics. Any variations could have an effect that allows one to play and another to fail to play.
Your suggestion about Sony getting tough on piracy in unpredictable ways (the rootkit exercise, for example) is very interesting. Sony is a large corporation whose left hand typically does not know what the right hand is doing. In the early 1990's Sony was trying to sell their high-speed video duplication equipment called "Sprinters" to the major video duplicators. Their tape sales group was selling a Sony tape that was only average quality at a very high price and did not always work well on their own Sprinter equipment. At the same time Sony attorneys were telling the same duplicators that Sony discovered that it owned the patent to the reel braking system in VHS cassettes--and that meant that the duplicators owed Sony something like $0.025 for every one of the millions of VHS cassettes duplicated for the previous 15 years! Customers were insisting Sony remove the newly installed Sprinters within hours of getting the legal calls! Amazing.
If the one Sony DVD player cannot play even book-typed DVD+R discs, it probably fails to conform to DVD Forum specs. The fact that you are using a recording drive compatible with Verbatim discs and that those discs play on most other DVD players points to the Sony player as the problem. Another factor is that it may not be able to read the discs because its signal amplifier is too low and not boosting the signal enough from the lower reflectivity on the recorded discs. If this is the case, it can be fixed with a service call; but that costs money and my not be worth it.
Joe, excellent advice, however I've taken a couple of DVD-DL disks into Best Buy and HHGreg and discovered that none of the sony players will work, however, a $29.99 Toshiba played it flawlessly. Guess which one I bought, still works great after two years.
I also picked up a real cheap Magnavox player from Sams Club for under $30.00. It will play any redorded disc I have -R +R +DL -DL and does so very well. My older SonyDVD player is a 5 disc player which will now be used solely for playing CD's because of its finicky playability with Recorded Verbatim DVD+R DL's. I will continue to no longer support high priced Sony products and I hope HDDVD wins the High Def war. Sony is giving retailers kickbacks ($) for promoting their Blue Ray drives. My guess is Sony can't compete with lower cost HDDVD drive sales so they feel the need to use brute force by buying their way onto retail store shelves, and print advertising through retailer kickbacks. Nice huh?
