Dolphinius_Rex re: my friend's problems with the Plextor 708a, his problems began with the media packaged with the drive itself!
Hmm media packaged with it.
The European version doesn't contain any media ! So are the american an canadian people getting some media in return for not haveing plextools ?
Dolphinius_Rex
For DVDs? I put no faith in K-Probe for DVD testing anymore. It started looking like it was doing a good job, but after further testing, I have no doubt that it is not doing a proper job. For one, I get inconsistant results from scanning the same disc several times. Also, a good result on K-Probe does not mean it will play properly. Contrary wise, a lot of really poor quality burns (according to K-Probe) work really well even in really picky DVD-ROMs and players. I have seen NOTHING that makes me feel K-Probe is providing accurate info, and I'm seeing more and more to make me think otherwise.
Wrong word accurate it can still be ! However you never know if a drive is meassureing disc's accurate. If you meassure a disc six times and get six different scores then the drive can still be accurate if the average of the six scores is the value the drive is supposed to be finding.
Accuracy is something we can not proof for CD & DVD testing. Unless you can verify the output. But with what ?
Analyzer could be accurate but also inaccurate.
However that it reports six inconsistant different values does mean it's measures not precise and for this reason the measurements are not reliable for dvd analyzing. For the error part the drive needs some decent precision. However did you take the heat up effect in count. So not meassure the same disc's without cool down time right after each other 10 times to see if it's precision is reliable ?
The second problem with K-probe that it doesn't report HF-signal info or tracking info makes it unusefull for testing tool of writing/disc quality.
2/3 of the info to base the analysis on if the disc is of good quality is missing.
rdgrimes
Also there's no such thing as "incorrectly reporting errors", they are either reported or not reported. So "incorrectly reporting" errors simply means "not reporting". Unless someone thinks that a drive is able to report an error when one did not occur, which would be very interesting indeed. I'm not saying that "drive y" is necessarily correct if it reports "error x" as being a C1 or PI error. But whatever it is reporting, it should be doing it the same very time.
How would we rate the interleaving effect ?
Because the data is de-interleaved between the stages, each of the bad symbols is now in separate blocks, and so they can be handled by the C2 stage. As a result of the interleaving, one uncorrectable symbol at C1 can become up to 28 bad symbols at C2, which is why E12 is often much higher than E31.
About reporting the same time the variance Rex and quite some other claims that this is not the case. So it isn't reporting things every time the same. So his conclusion for not ussefull is right even according to your claims.
Also tests with the EAC C2 tool have seen drives reporting C2 when there weren't supposed to be reporting C2.
It may well be, (in fact probably is), that different drives or reporting programs will report different things as being "C1 or PI", and for this reason (and other reasons) you shouldn't attempt to compare scans from different drives or programs
Sorry but since we do need to find out how good reprocution is since we don't have accuracy. So we need to check between drives and programs. In all the other cases we can only check read performance for one drive. Since some people want to say something about disc quality and how it performs more general (Like the profesional stuff does better) we need to check the performance on different drives.
We do not know if ROM drives are reporting the same things (as PI or PO) as the burners are, but most reasonable people might conclude that it appears they are not. But since they cannot scan at the same speed as the burners, comparisons are questionable at best. I have to assume that since Kprobe was written specifically for use with burners, that it reports, (and the burners report), exactly what the designers of them intended. At the very least, they report consistantly the same things. They do not report "error x" as a PI today, and "error y" as a PI tomorrow.
I think the software was just used for rought internal checks on error levels and for this it indeed services. However if the designers intended to use it for full writing quality tests then we now know why there are compatability issues and why Lite On hasn't solved them with a firmware update.
