#267544 - 18/10/2005 19:11
reading lots of DVDs
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Last month, I shipped several hundred CDs to MusicShifter, who ripped everything to Apple Lossless and shipped me my CDs back with about 50 DVDs worth of those files. So far so good. My home Mac (circa 2001 PowerMac G4 with the Pioneer DVD-R "SuperDrive") had massive error rates. My wife's Dell (relatively new) has the flakey Bluetooth problem, discussed earlier, and seems to have heat issues with the DVD drive running too much. Now I'm doing it on my work machine, running Windows XP, and using my trusty Plextor PX-708A (DVD +/- R/RW). I'm still seeing some errors, although it's going generally better than the home machines. Questions:
- What's the fastest "copy" command to use? Cygwin's 'cp' has traditionally been quite slow, at least when doing anything over the network. Microsoft's 'xcopy' is what I'm using so far, mainly because it has a "ignore errors" flag, which is key to working around these blasted DVDs. It still takes about 29 minutes to read a whole DVD. (Windows Explorer drag-and-drop doesn't work because it can't be told to ignore errors.)
- What's the way to do this reliably? Here's some xcopy output:
Quote:
$ xcopy 'e:\' 'g:\Music-Lossless' /E /R /Y /C /G
E:\Order-000579_Files.htm
File creation error - Error performing inpage operation.
E:\Orbital\In Sides Disc 2\05 Halcyon [Live][-].m4a
File creation error - Copy Protection Error - The read failed because the sector
is encrypted.
Switching to cygwin's 'cp', I was able to get both of those files copied without error. I suppose I could just do everything with cygwin, but maybe there are other tools that the collective wisdom out here might recommend...
EDIT: It looks like cygwin's cp takes 31 minutes to read a DVD while xcopy takes 29 minutes. Neither is spectacular, so I might as well stick with cygwin since it has fewer errors. What I really want is a much faster tool, assuming my DVD drive can go that fast.
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#267545 - 18/10/2005 20:42
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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enthusiast
Registered: 11/06/2003
Posts: 384
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I don't know if it's faster, but I like cygwin's rsync which will do dirtrees like xcopy. You should also try doing it via the GUI.
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#267546 - 18/10/2005 23:31
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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Errors? Crazy. Maybe you could get a $47 Pioneer DVR-110D from MWave. I have a pile of Pioneer DVDR drives home and at work through their many revisions and they work great. I used one to burn a box full of of DV cam video in a short period of time with no problems.
_________________________
- FireFox31 110gig MKIIa (30+80), Eutronix lights, 32 meg stacked RAM, Filener orange gel lens, Greenlights Lit Buttons green set
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#267547 - 19/10/2005 01:21
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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addict
Registered: 01/03/2002
Posts: 599
Loc: Florida
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You just might be interested in the Unstoppable Copier. I used it maybe a year ago to get files off a CD that was burned in 95.
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#267548 - 19/10/2005 08:12
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31597
Loc: Seattle, WA
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Not to rain on your parade, Dapper Dan, but...
Quote:
I shipped several hundred CDs to MusicShifter...
Quote:
...and shipped me my CDs back with about 50 DVDs worth of those files.
... Remind me how this is more convenient than just ripping them yourself?
Especially the part about how they're in a proprietary lossless format that you'll still need to transcode to MP3 if you want to do anything useful with the files in question?
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#267549 - 19/10/2005 10:47
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: tfabris]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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In hindsight, I should have chosen the option to ship them a USB hard drive, saving myself the labor of loading all of these damn burned DVDs. The big time savings, at the end of the day, is metadata. The data that comes back from GraceNote or FreeDB is just not good enough and I typically spent significant amounts of time fixing it. At least in theory, MusicShifter claims to do better metadata.
As to the format question, I agonized over that. I would have preferred FLAC, but it doesn't integrate cleanly into iTunes, which is my tool of choice. Apple Lossless, of course, integrates perfectly. I can then let my computer grind away at the conversion to MP3s for the car, the DJing laptop, and so forth.
Also, I've got time constraints. My daughter, now five months old, can't crawl yet, but it's only a matter of time, and I need to get the rickety bookcase full of CDs out of the house and into storage before then. I don't have enough time to do all the unripped CDs before it's too late.
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#267550 - 19/10/2005 10:51
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: Attack]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Quote:
You just might be interested in the Unstoppable Copier.
This sounds exactly like what I want. Did I mention that I love this board?
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#267551 - 19/10/2005 20:09
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/02/2002
Posts: 3212
Loc: Portland, OR
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Quote:
rickety bookcase full of CDs
You might have hurricanes, but we have earthquakes. Maybe some of these would help? 
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#267552 - 19/10/2005 20:18
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: canuckInOR]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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If/when my daughter first tries to climb up on the book case, pulling down all of those CDs, things could get ugly fast, regardless of whether the bookcase is properly anchored. The shelves, themselves, aren't terribly well attached to the frame, and the CDs are freestanding...
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#267553 - 19/10/2005 20:33
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Erm. Shouldn't the discs be error free anyway? The only times I've ever had problems reading DVD-R discs is when it was either badly scratched or it was cheap crap media which was marginal. Either problem isn't really something that should be happening if you paid them to rip your CDs to DVD.
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#267554 - 19/10/2005 23:04
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: tman]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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That was my thought, hoping an inexpensive high quality DVD(RWetcetc) drive would remove all doubt. It would be a shame if they tried to burn 16x on some cheap old 1x media, if that even matters.
_________________________
- FireFox31 110gig MKIIa (30+80), Eutronix lights, 32 meg stacked RAM, Filener orange gel lens, Greenlights Lit Buttons green set
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#267555 - 20/10/2005 15:41
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: FireFox31]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Indeed, the discs should be error free, but my experience is that they're not. I've now cranked through about 1/3 of the stack, using cygwin's cp, and I'm getting (apparently) flawless results, albeit not terribly fast (~30 minutes to read a full disc). If I try using xcopy or drag-and-drop from the GUI, I get all kinds of errors. My guess is that cygwin is just doing things the simple-but-dumb way, which works fine, but the Microsoft tools are trying to be "smarter" and, thus, are failing.
At least my Plextor drive seems to be working consistently, unlike the Pioneer drive in my Mac or the whatever cheap drive in my wife's Dell laptop.
Is there an easy way to look at a burned DVD and tell what brand it is? They've got pre-printed labels slapped on the top, and I'd rather not tear them off. As such, there's no easy way to see a brand name. There's a code on the inner clear plastic part that says "3D524A308404GH". And, on the inner part of the disc surface, there are two other codes: "0305" on one side and "GH000073" on the other side. The disk surface is blue/blue-grey.
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#267556 - 20/10/2005 15:59
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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The Unix cdrecord will tell you the brand of the CD it's about to write to. I don't know about DVDs or about already-burned media, but it might be worth a shot.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#267557 - 20/10/2005 22:34
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Get this... One of the CDs I had ripped was Metallica's "...And Justice for All". Would you believe that this confused cygwin's cp, but worked just fine with drag-and-drop? *sigh* Quote:
cp: cannot stat `/cygdrive/e/Metallica/...And Justice for All': No such file or directory
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#267558 - 21/10/2005 02:22
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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addict
Registered: 01/03/2002
Posts: 599
Loc: Florida
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Dvd identifier should tell you who made the disc.
_________________________
Chad
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#267559 - 21/10/2005 15:44
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: Attack]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Sweet! Here's what it says: Quote:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-R:FUJIFILM03]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disc & Book Type : [DVD-R] - [DVD-R]
Manufacturer Name : [Fuji Film]
Manufacturer ID : [FUJIFILM03]
Blank Disc Capacity : [2,298,496 Sectors = 4.71 GB (4.38 GiB)]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ DVD Identifier - http://DVD.Identifier.CDfreaks.com ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable manufacturer to me. Given that it's a DVD-R, it's surprising that my Mac (with the Pioneer DVD-R "super" drive) would have so much trouble. Hmm...
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#267560 - 21/10/2005 16:03
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Never checked for DVDs but I'm assuming it'd be similar to CDs because of the technology. The manufacturer you read off the disc is just whoever made the stamping disc used in manufacture. It doesn't identify the actual disc manufacturer itself.
You need several parts to make blank media. The stamping disc to get the groove that the burner follows in the bottom substrate, a dye layer, a metal layer and a protective top layer. Each one of those can have costs cut and be marginal
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#267561 - 26/01/2006 22:26
Re: reading lots of DVDs
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Dragging back an old thread... Turned out that only one disk out of 50 had a truly unrecoverable error. Otherwise, I was able to extract everything and get onto the real problem: dealing with the metadata. I wrote up a full review of MusicShifter, if anybody wants to read the gory details. In sum, they're worth the bother if you want to trade-off money for time in ripping a large collection, but they're far from perfect, particularly if you want accurate metadata for obscure releases.
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