It was made to burn...
Murphy's Law of Availability: Brains X Beauty X Availability = Constant
It was a funny moment yesterday, I went to Richie Street to buy a DVD Writer as my father gave me permission and $$$ to get it. It took me about 10 mins to decide upon what brand to buy. Just before stepping out of my house, I read the reviews about various brands of DVD writers in the internet. After reading a detailed review of Samsung TS-H552B DVD Writer (http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/163), I made up my mind to buy that model. One thing which I was concerned about is the questionable DVD writing quality mentioned in the "Negatives" section of the review conclusion. In the computer pheripherals shop, I was shown models of Sony and Gigabite which was readily available in the display. The Samsung model was in the stock room and it took about 5 mins for the shop keeper to bring it from there to the shop. Again, I went through the specifications given on the outer carton of each of the model.
Among the rest, Samsung had some special features:
1. 5x Double Layer Recording compared to 4x writing speed of Sony and Gigabyte
2. Speed Adjustment Technology
3. Silent Pulse Width Modulation Technology
4. Tilt Actuator Compensation Technology and
5. Double Optimum Power Calibration Technology.
The average Seek Time was about 130 ms for a standard DVD-ROM and 110 ms for a CD-ROM. This was far more better compared to the reported seek times of the other two models. All the three writers had Nero 6 bundled with it. Further the Samsung Model is more recent to the review I saw in the internet. This model is TS-H552U. I made up my mind and bought it. It costed around Rs. 4200/-.
Installing the DVD Drive in my new cabinet was not a problem at all. I made it as the Secondary Slave leaving the Primary for optimum HDD data transfer. The drive was detected properly and surprisingly XP did not give me any trouble at all. I made a complete copy of my E-Book Library in a DVD-R (3.42 GB). As I stored the E-Books in a compressed folder, it took 12 mins for caching the files and to complete the DVD write task compared to the regular 6 mins. Everything went smooth except for the DVD Video playback.
The DVD Playback was soo stucky and it seemed as though my processor couldn't take it any longer. This was due to my PIII 600 MHz system which was way too old when compared to the minimum system requirements reported to watch a DVD movie. Though everything apart from it was fine, I still had a feeling that I could just tweak something to solve the problem.
After coming back from my regular work (dinner, watching LOTR - The Two Towers using my Pioneer DVD Player), I started computing with the ultimate goal of solving the "Stucky DVD Playback Problem". It was already 12:30 AM by then. So, as a pre-initiating step, I removed all the Video Codecs that were used to playback the DVD in my system (MPEG2 Decoder, Nero DVD Decoder and Stinky's MPEG2 Decoder) and then went to sleep.
This morning, I restarted my PC and as expected the DVD video was unplayable with Windows' mplayer2.exe. Somehow, Nero ShowTime was still able play the DVD with that "Stucky" feature. And to my surprise, Windows Media Player 10 was also able to play the DVD (way too stretched in size, but viola! - no sticky feature). This confirmed me that the problem was neither with the DVD-Writer nor with the way too old configuration of my PC but with the video codec not being able to process/decode at an optimal rate (atleast not to my system's config). The end-result has been narrowed - I just need to install a DVD Decoder Codec that takes very less CPU/memory to do post processing. I tried installing Stinky's MPEG2 Decoder plugin again. Stinky's was all St(i/u)(n/c)ky. I removed it. Next I tried with DScaler MPEG Filter plugin. Yesss! It worked. WMP10 had no troubles playing the DVD at correct screen ratio.
No wonder, the problem took me almost half a day to resolve it. But, I learnt really a lot about what messed-up video codecs could do and best part of it is to share this with people like you who read my blog :-)
It was a funny moment yesterday, I went to Richie Street to buy a DVD Writer as my father gave me permission and $$$ to get it. It took me about 10 mins to decide upon what brand to buy. Just before stepping out of my house, I read the reviews about various brands of DVD writers in the internet. After reading a detailed review of Samsung TS-H552B DVD Writer (http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/163), I made up my mind to buy that model. One thing which I was concerned about is the questionable DVD writing quality mentioned in the "Negatives" section of the review conclusion. In the computer pheripherals shop, I was shown models of Sony and Gigabite which was readily available in the display. The Samsung model was in the stock room and it took about 5 mins for the shop keeper to bring it from there to the shop. Again, I went through the specifications given on the outer carton of each of the model.
Among the rest, Samsung had some special features:
1. 5x Double Layer Recording compared to 4x writing speed of Sony and Gigabyte
2. Speed Adjustment Technology
3. Silent Pulse Width Modulation Technology
4. Tilt Actuator Compensation Technology and
5. Double Optimum Power Calibration Technology.
The average Seek Time was about 130 ms for a standard DVD-ROM and 110 ms for a CD-ROM. This was far more better compared to the reported seek times of the other two models. All the three writers had Nero 6 bundled with it. Further the Samsung Model is more recent to the review I saw in the internet. This model is TS-H552U. I made up my mind and bought it. It costed around Rs. 4200/-.
Installing the DVD Drive in my new cabinet was not a problem at all. I made it as the Secondary Slave leaving the Primary for optimum HDD data transfer. The drive was detected properly and surprisingly XP did not give me any trouble at all. I made a complete copy of my E-Book Library in a DVD-R (3.42 GB). As I stored the E-Books in a compressed folder, it took 12 mins for caching the files and to complete the DVD write task compared to the regular 6 mins. Everything went smooth except for the DVD Video playback.
The DVD Playback was soo stucky and it seemed as though my processor couldn't take it any longer. This was due to my PIII 600 MHz system which was way too old when compared to the minimum system requirements reported to watch a DVD movie. Though everything apart from it was fine, I still had a feeling that I could just tweak something to solve the problem.
After coming back from my regular work (dinner, watching LOTR - The Two Towers using my Pioneer DVD Player), I started computing with the ultimate goal of solving the "Stucky DVD Playback Problem". It was already 12:30 AM by then. So, as a pre-initiating step, I removed all the Video Codecs that were used to playback the DVD in my system (MPEG2 Decoder, Nero DVD Decoder and Stinky's MPEG2 Decoder) and then went to sleep.
This morning, I restarted my PC and as expected the DVD video was unplayable with Windows' mplayer2.exe. Somehow, Nero ShowTime was still able play the DVD with that "Stucky" feature. And to my surprise, Windows Media Player 10 was also able to play the DVD (way too stretched in size, but viola! - no sticky feature). This confirmed me that the problem was neither with the DVD-Writer nor with the way too old configuration of my PC but with the video codec not being able to process/decode at an optimal rate (atleast not to my system's config). The end-result has been narrowed - I just need to install a DVD Decoder Codec that takes very less CPU/memory to do post processing. I tried installing Stinky's MPEG2 Decoder plugin again. Stinky's was all St(i/u)(n/c)ky. I removed it. Next I tried with DScaler MPEG Filter plugin. Yesss! It worked. WMP10 had no troubles playing the DVD at correct screen ratio.
No wonder, the problem took me almost half a day to resolve it. But, I learnt really a lot about what messed-up video codecs could do and best part of it is to share this with people like you who read my blog :-)
posted by Ganesh Anand T T at
10:34 PM
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