Download: July 2007
From July 2007
Community Comments
DVD Snafus; Burning v. Replicating; Handling Spam
By Cheryl Leff
Q: I recently made a short video, which I burned to DVD on my home computer. It played fine on my computer and on the DVD player attached to my TV, but a friend could not play a copy of it on his DVD player. Why is it that commercially made DVDs, such as movies, will play in almost any DVD player, while those that are “burned” at home will often play on some machines, but not others? Is there anything I can do to insure that DVDs I burn at home will play reliably in the greatest possible number of machines?
A: Commercially created DVDs such as Hollywood movies are made by a different process than those you burn at home: they are replicated, rather than duplicated. CDs and DVDs may be duplicated by copying them electronically, byte by byte, to another storage device, such as your hard drive, a flash drive, or another CD or DVD. In the latter case, your CD/DVD drive’s laser literally burns the data onto the new CD or DVD by melting tiny pits into the metallic layer of the disk. High-volume commercial copies are made by stamping the pits into the heated medium using a “stamper” or “glass master,” which makes each disk an exact copy of the master. Since the glass master must be prepared first, from a high-quality digital master, often on tape, the process is more time-consuming and the setup is more costly, so it is usually only available for production of 1,000 or more copies. The digital master is thoroughly tested first; if errors are found, they must be corrected before proceeding, so many problems are eliminated before the glass master is made, whereas errors in burned copies aren’t usually found until after the copy is made.
The blank CD or DVD medium can be another source of problems. While both recording media and recorders have improved over the years, there are still significant variations in the quality of blank media available. The same movie, burned by the same recorder onto different brands of medium, may or may not be playable on some other player. Generally speaking, you tend to get roughly what you pay for, with “bargain basement”, no-name media being the least reliable and premium, name-brand media being more reliable. (For reviews of the performance of different brands of media, check out http://www.cdr-zone.com/reviews/dvd_media_reviews/).
Q: I have a PC running Windows XP. I recently tried saving files to a blank DVD-R on my CD/DVD combo drive. I get an error message that says” insert blank disc into drive qM.” I am able to load and run software and play movies from the drive. What is do you think is wrong?
A: It sounds like you’ve run into one of the problems mentioned above: poor quality CD media. I suggest you try a better quality, name-brand blank CD. There are also some brands of disk that look the same on both sides, so you could have it in upside down. Try flipping it over.
Q: I am using MS XP, and I would like to know how I can alphabetize my Favorites. I downloaded a program called Qsort, but it is only a 30-day trial, and I don’t want to pay for it now that the trial period is over.
A: You don’t need an additional program to do this. In Internet Explorer, click Favorites. Left-click on any Favorite, then right-click on it. From the drop-down menu, click “Sort by name.”
Q: After being away for 10 days, I received 110 page (3,000 messages) of junk emails. How can I erase/delete the entire page at one time? It is too time consuming to check each of the 3,000 messages and delete them one at a time.
A: The easiest way is to click on the first email in the list, then, holding down the Shift key, use the down arrow key to select all the emails down to whatever is the last one you want to include; then hit the Delete key to delete them all.
A more automated way would be to set up a Message Rule to delete anything older than a certain date. You would have to create the rule, apply it, then either delete it or de-activate (uncheck) it until the next time you needed it.
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