Pendell

me, muttering to myself as I create an ImgBurn Forums account: *"you know what's going to happen, right? the moment you try to recreate the issue for evidence and screenshots for your post, it's going to magically start working. You know that, right?"

ImgBurn, the moment I hit Burn after creating the account: Operation Completed Successfully! :3

It burned two DVD-RW discs just fine. It burned one CD-RW disc just fine. I went to burn a second CD-RW disc, and witnessed the baffling error:
Failed to write sectors -150 - -119 - Reason: Command Sequence Error

It was trying - and failing, unsurprisingly - to write to sectors which do not exist. Discs start at sector ZERO. They do not, my dear ImgBurn, start at negative one hundred and fifty. Yeah I'm not surprised you had issues with burning to the first 32 sectors of non-existent space.

I looked through all my settings and could not find anything. I tried three different discs and it did not work. I wondered if the image I was using could be fucked up, so I went back to the image I burned to the first CD-RW, it did not work. I erased the discs, both Quick and Full erasures. It did not work.

Except this time, I did a Quick Erase, go to attempt the burn again, and it just worked? Like. I don't know. Maybe ImgBurn got into some weird null state but after enough time and enough attempts it just started working properly again?

I wonder why we as a society have moved away from burnable optical media.

there are many options but the best one for all purposes is and will continue to always be ImgBurn.

ImgBurn has not been updated since 2013. This is because it does not need to be updated anymore, unless a new optical disc format hits the market (highly unlikely). ImgBurn does not have bugs. ImgBurn works flawlessy. ImgBurn will run just fine on Windows 10 or 11, but will adorably proclaim itself to be running on Windows 8 in its log window.

ImgBurn has a setting for every possible thing you could want to do with a recordable disc, and gives you as much information as it possibly can, while adhering strictly to the specs laid out in the respective formats' official standards.

ImgBurn is love. ImgBurn is life.

still bothered by that one Verbatim BD-RE DL that burns fine on my $100 portable blu-ray drive, but consistently chokes around the layer transition on my $300 desktop blu-ray drive. IF THERE WAS TO BE AN ISSUE AT ALL, it should be the other way around, right? Like it would totally make sense if the $300 drive burned more reliably than the $100 drive, that would be logical. But nothing about Computers is ever logical.

After perusing Redfox and ImgBurn forums extensively, I have learned A Thing. Apparently, a part of the recordable blu-ray spec is "spare areas," which is basically the same concept we apply with SSDs today - a certain amount of space on the disc can be set aside, so that if write errors pop up, those bad writes can be remapped to the spare areas. All reports seem to indicate this is handled seamlessly enough that it doesn't impact video playback. As another caveat, not only do you lose space, but in order for your drive to properly implement the spare area concept, burn speed is halved, as the drive continually verifies writes as it performs them, so any write errors can be immediately remapped. So a 2x burn will take as much time as a 1x burn, or possibly even slower. This can balloon burn times pretty absurdly, as I've seen reports that burns utilizing spare areas on 3 or 4 layer discs can take six to eight hours. Imagine that.

ImgBurn, by default, disables these spare areas, which gives you access to the full capacity of a disc. My Verbatim BD-RE DL shows as being exactly 50GB in size. I was curious if enabling spare areas would allow both of my drives to handle this disc without any issues. So I ticked all the correct boxes, and then did what you have to do. A full disc format. Because BD-REs behave like DVD+RWs did, they need to be formatted to be usable - which in both cases amounts to having a blank session written across the entire disc.

A BD-RE DL disc takes 90 minutes to burn at 2x (without spare areas, of course), and a full disc format takes the exact same amount of time, as it has to zero out the entire disc. I performed this full format on the XD07, just to be safe, with the size for the spare area format set to "whatever the drive/disc prefers". The resultant disc was now a 46GB BD-RE DL.

I took it back over to the desktop drive. Loaded up an ISO to test - my latest rip, the BFI release of The Wages of Fear.

It's too big for the disc. The ISO is 47GB. The disc only has 46GB available.

So I go into ImgBurn settings again - this time on the desktop - and switch the format size to "Maximum" which reduces the spare area to as little as is needed, prioritizing usable disc space, and click full format AGAIN, only this time on the desktop.

Last time I tried formatting this disc in the desktop drive, it ran into the same error it always has, around that layer transition. This time... it's currently sitting at 85% formatted (one hour and three minutes after the format started 🙃) and hasn't thrown a single error! I have to imagine the desktop drive is seeing the sectors it dislikes and remapping them to the spare area as it goes. Hopefully this will be the end of issues? And hopefully after this format I'll have hit the sweet spot so I can actually burn most of my dual-layer ISOs to this disc for testing? If this doesn't work I'm gonna give up and stick a label on this disc that says "XD07 ONLY" and try to move on with my life.

Anyways I might be sending out some of the first batch of burned discs this week so if you've asked for one, look forward to that

The Pioneer BDR-S13U-X to be a specific, a top of the line drive that I drooled over before it even released in the US and was only available as untranslated diagram pics on Pioneer's JP site, a drive I bought on a splurge-y whim with my tax return at the start of this year that cost nearly as much as the entire PC I built (I already had a mobo and GPU, so it was not that expensive to build, but still, a $300 BD-R drive for your PC is nothing to scoff at), a drive I have up until this accursed moment had few issues with.

It just fucks up burning dual-layer blu-rays. I've tried 3 different times now using a Verbatim BD-RE DL that I have verified to work just fine with my other, two year old Pioneer BDR-XD07B, a $100 external USB BD-R drive that I'd bought for use with my Thinkpad before I considered building a desktop. This drive has happily burned and re-burned the same Verbatim BD-R DL using the exact same disc images with no complaints, and has so far burned two different cheapo Smartbuy-brand (Ritek) BD-R DLs also without issue. This is very angering and annoying.

The S13's issue seems to be specifically around the layer transition, thus it being an issue that has only cropped up with dual-layer media. ImgBurn will start throwing Write Errors, which would then curiously succeed on the second attempt, always. This would happen a dozen or so times spanning from the last sectors of Layer 0 into the first sectors of Layer 1. Then, when verifying the disc, it would spit Uncorrectable Error after Uncorrectable Error, no matter how many times you hit Retry.

So Something Is Obviously Fucked Up.

Ironically, when searching online for this issue, I got dozens of forum threads of people saying that LG drives among others were "known to have issues around layer breaks" and people telling others to buy nothing but Pioneer drives because "they don't have those issues."

Hmmm... so I went to go try installing Pioneer BD Drive Utility again. There is a whole other funny story to my previous attempts when I bought the drive earlier this year, remind me to tell it sometime, but it had ended in failure. This time it Worked, for Computer Reasons, and I was at last able to tinker with Settings. At long last I could turn off all its bullshit "features" like PureRead+ and Quiet Mode and shit... and I wondered if turning all that crap off would make it burn discs correctly. After all, I had turned off the same things previously on the XD07, which was burning the same discs happily.

So I am attempting once again. My BD-RE DLs only support 2x write speed so according to ImgBurn this will all take one hour and seven minutes from my time of writing this, so I will check back in to say whether I found Success or More Confusing Bullshit, what a cliffhanger!

but anyways it appears changing those settings did not fix the issue and the drive still had write errors around the layer change :p

I mean fortunately I do have a drive that burns these discs just fine but it's personally very frustrating that the Expensive Drive I bought just for this kind of thing doesn't work as good as the Cheapo Drive I thought would be relegated to "only when I need a portable drive" status

I could test one of my BD-R DL discs in the internal drive just to see if maybe the drive only has issues with RE discs or maybe that particular Verbatim disc, but I kinda don't wanna risk making a coaster when I know I have another drive that guaranteed will Not do that. But my curious boy brain itches for it. "You need to test all variables" my brain yells at me. "This isn't a fucking science experiment I'm just burning some blu-rays" I try to yell back, but nobody listens.

Following advice from a Redfox forum thread, I changed settings in ImgBurn this time, which slightly alter how ImgBurn treats the disc.

This user (who goes by tectpro and made their post in December 2022) advised going into the Write tab of ImgBurn's settings, and first disabling the "prefer format without spare areas" and "BD-R Verify Not Required" options, and also to enable the "Perform OPC (Optimal Power Consumption) Before Write" option.

With these changes, I then decided to try burning to one of my Smartbuy BD-R DL discs, knowing I'd end up with a useless coaster if the burn failed. I set burn speed to 2x, and waited.

It succeeded! No burn issues, verified just fine, and plays just fine in my players! Well I'll be damned! At least I know my drive isn't a lemon lmao.

Curious now to try burning to that Verbatim BD-RE DL again, I wonder if those settings changes fixed all my woes forever, or if this drive just really hates that disc. Maybe changing the settings did nothing and the drive would've burned to single-write DLs just fine the entire time. I'm not sure, but I am sure I'm never changing those settings to anything else ever again!