Greetings! I've been through here a few times and I am learning by trial and error apparently. I bought a DVD burner a few months ago and have been experimenting on backing up DVDs with the Memorex Media that I bought at the time (I didn't know I swear!). I've tested the 4 burns I have done (4 Rooms, Adventures in Babysitting, Akira, and Waiting...) I've had zero true coasters in the process, but I have had a few interesting responses as well. I would burn them usually in the evening before I went to bed, and would then drop them into my porable AMG player. I know it's a crap player, but I thought...if it works in this thing it should probably work in anything. Apparently, I was wrong. They have all run almost perfectly in the portable (with the exception that I get a strange camera angle feature popup in AiB). Otherwise they work well. So I did what I do and took them to my girlfriends to test them, her portable won't play them (bad skipping) and her home player skips about every three seconds. So in shotgun style I take them home and try them on my APEX 600a, which has always played everything (and which still has the imfamous bypass menu). Note my surprise when they don't even recognize them. Hmm, maybe it was because I used decrypter+Shrink+a free burning program instead of Nero. No dice. So this means that my 600a doesn't like the media (or possibly my hammer burner, but I doubt it). Apparently, my girlfriend's DVD player doesn't either. Options are to go with the TY or ultra disks that are so highly recommended here ... or swap players. I can't seem to find enough substantial evidence that my player will support this new media anyway (as it's about 6 years old now). Would anyone be able to recommend options for a preferred media that actually has an APEX 600a, or would someone recommend a simple quality player that is cost effective and will handle many types of burn disks? I'm no audiophile, or videophile for that matter, and prefer the most simple solution at a cost effective price (even though my next batch will be an upgrade to the TY disks for obvious reasons). When I used the search, unfortunately it appears that my media player may simply be outdated, which saddens me quite a bit as it was quite popular in its day. Anyway, thanks for reading and thanks for the cool links to the websited about media players and their known compatability, that was very helpful before I asked.
I used to own a 600a. Decent player, and it played everything I put in there. Plenty of Memorex along the way, and they were fine. Many times it's not really the media, but the writer not burning it correctly. I've had excellent results over the years using nothing but NEC drives, and by god they will burn any type of disc out there including the dreaded CMC Memorex media.
It really depends on what your player will except. I used cheap media from wal-mart/bestbuy and have had odd problems with diffrent players as well. Some would play perfect, some would skip and freeze during playback and some wouldnt play at all. I have 3 diffrent DVD players. My cheapest player would play everything but the 2 more expensive DVD players had problems with the cheaper media (Fuji, Memorex, imation). I then got tored of having problems with the DVD backups and bought some TY's. They are only $10 more then what i would spend with the cheap media and it was well worth the money. The TY's will play on every DVD player I have without a problem. So I would get some TY's and start from there. Uasly media issues are due to cheap media.
