DVD Architect burning irregularities

DaveF wrote on 9/12/2010, 3:57 PM

HP Quad Core 2 with 8300 CPU
8 GM RAM
gazillions space on hard drives
DVD Architect 5.0b
Win 7 Home Premium

When trying to burn a project to a Verbatim DVD R- in this PC, I randomly get the following error:

The command failed due to a IOCTL error...

The error is fairly well documented on the web. I've seen it described as a driver error with the DVD burner, and I also found a Sony statement says it's a DVD Architect problem with no scheduled repair date. Either way, the problem is random. I can burn ten projects with no problem and then suddenly I have 4 DVD-r's fail during the burn process, only to have the 5th one work.

So, I'm using one of the included disk burning programs that came with the PC, called Cyberlink Power to Go.

So, I had a little time today and did an experiment. The program is 3-1/2 minutes, created in Vegas 9, rendered to MPEG2/AC3.

When burned using DVD Architect, the burned space on the DVD is about 3/4 of inch wide, when looking at the bottom of the disk.

When burned using Power to Go, it's only 3/8 of an inch wide.

The project is about 400 MB in size. Interesting that DVD Architect (which isn't burning reliably) needs twice as much disk Real Estate to hold the same program that Cyberlink can fit on the same brand and size of disk.

Just curious if any of the experts here know about the disk burning process and have any ideas.

Comments

Steve Mann wrote on 9/12/2010, 4:42 PM

First, IOCTL is definitely a driver problem. IOCTL is a very low-level call in the O/S kernel, and not called from the application. Get the program "DriverDetective" from http://www.drivershq.com/

I've used it for about a year and trust it to be honest in it's scan - unlike the many online driver scams.

As far as the burned real estate, don't worry about it. You're looking at lead-in and lead-out differences and different programs generate different size lead-in/out bands. Basically a whole bunch of NOP data. this goes way back to the early days of DVD players where some players wouldn't play a DVD that had too small a data area. This was due to the player strictly following the DVD specification (which is also why early DVD players won't play 'burned' DVD's). The work-around was to make an artificially large lead-in area.

Steve Mann

DaveF wrote on 9/13/2010, 7:23 AM

Interesting about the burned Real Estate - I never read anything about that in the past.

Not arguing about the IOCTL being a driver problem, although it's certainly curious that it's only a problem for one program and only some of the time I use it. The PC is one of those fully assembled PC's from Costco (IOW, I didn't build this one myself), I was curious to find out what other users were experiencing.

As far as the driver problem, I found it's much quicker to use the third party disk burning. DVD Architect prepares the files in about five seconds, and the disk burning software burned the disk in about a minute. DVD Architect took a good 4 or 5 minutes to prepare and burn the disk. When I do a 60 minute program, I hope the time savings is similar.

BlackMax wrote on 9/13/2010, 12:50 PM

I'm using one of the included disk burning programs that came with the PC, called Cyberlink Power to Go.

You should try instead the rock-solid freeware program ImgBurn. Among many other things, it will give you a nice burn log which is useful if you ever have any problems with your burner or media.