I'd always imagined that the best thing for tackling DVDs was the best DVD drive possible. I have a new Acer laptop, and a new Freecom 20x external DVD burner. However, I find often when I try to read DVDs, these both give up with an error message (usually cyclic redundancy), and I have to get out my elderly laptop, which has a fairly rubbish DVD drive, but seems to be able to read and copy just about anything I throw at it. I would have imagined the better quality drives would have performed better, but it certainly doesn't work out in practice like that. I'd be glad if somebody could explain this to me.
a cyclic redundancy error could be a couple things 1. a scratched/bad/dirty DVD 2. not using the correct software to remove the copy protection the top drives are 1. Pioneer 2. Lite-On 3. Samsung 4. NEC the only drive in that list i have trouble with transcoding sometimes is the Lite-On brand. I never have problems with the Pioneer drives transcoding correctly you may have a better drive than you think in the laptop most are rebadged drives.
