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LG DVD Recorder Problem
ayrshire lass
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Can anyone give me advice? I have had an LG DRT389H Recorder for 3 years, how long are they supposed to last before they go faulty? I notice lately discs are taking ages to load in, or don't load in at all, unless I initialize the disc first, which means that anything else stored on the disc is wiped out. The discs I am using are good quality DVD-RW, they have all been used but not excessively, so feel they can't be at fault , it must be the machine. Also sometimes when I am recoding something, machine keeps stopping and starting . Do you think I should get rid? Any advice would be helpful.
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First of all try a laser lens cleaner kit, it's basically a CD/DVD disc with some small brushes on it and a bottle of cleaning fluid. Put a few drops on the brushes, run it through the player a couple of times and then leave it for a while for the fluid to evaporate.
A more comprehensive clean can be done if needed, but that involves opening up the machine so should only be done if you are comfortable doing that.
Basically you remove the top cover. With some machines you should be able to see the laser lens assembly, but on most machines you are presented with the top of the DVD drive itself, and have to remove the drive and then remove the drive's cover. You than take a cotton bud and put a few drops of cleaning fluid on it, and very gently wipe the laser lens etc. You do have to be gentle, any firm pressure can damage the lens or push it out of alignment. Once done reassemble the machine and test it. If you go down this route keep an eye on where the screws go and how the drive is connected, it's usually just standard PC type power and data connectors that connect the drive to the machine.
Thanks for your advice, but a little too complicated for me:)
Not exactly true - the SOGA gives you the right to take the retailer to court, where YOU have to prove a manufacturing defect in the equipment. And there's certainly no blanket amount that would be awarded, even if you won, that's entirely down to the judge.
Three years is probably not unexpected fro a DVD recorder, depending on the conditions it's used under - as captainkremmen suggested, it may be down to dirty laser or optics, which isn't a manufacturing defect and wouldn't be covered by SOGA anyway. Essentially it's 'misuse' by using it in a contaminating environment - smoking (for example) kills DVD's as well as people.
Thanking everyone for their replies, have to say that taking machine to bits to clean laser is a bit too complicated fo me, and as you have said about 3 years use , and I use it constantly for recording, it may have had it's day. As a last resort I thought I may buy some new discs and see how that goes, I wondered if the discs I have are damaged, as I don't usually put them away and leave them lying around all the time, although I usually wipe dust off them before using. Not sure if that would be the problem.
Does anyone smoke in the house?, or do you have an open fire?, or even a gas fire?. All of these commonly damage DVD recorders and players, with the likelihood in the order listed.
Never touch the surface with fingers. If there's dust (which there wouldn't be if you stored them right) better to use some sort of air blower such as a soft plastic drinks bottle to blow the dust away. If you do need to wipe any stubborn marks always wipe with a soft cloth in straight lines from the centre to the outside, never wipe around the disc in a circular manner.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that recordable disks are far less reflective than commercially pressed disks. So as the laser power drops off then playback of recordable disks will die well before you lose the ability to play commercial disks.
A cleaning disk will do no harm and may give you a bit more life out of the beast. And is a lot easier than taking it apart.
No , none of these things apply. As I said I thought discs were faulty, but not sure. I have unplugged scart connections and power cord and cleaned them but still the same, only thing I have noticed is, the antenna connection which comes through wall from roof aerial has a sort of loose wire , had a bit of bother getting it back into socket at back of machine. Would that be causing fault, do you know? Thanks.
Much more likely is a problem with the laser, either dirt or simple wearing out through use.
Thanks for that, I was worried that the loose wire connection was maybe causing the fault. As you say, I could have worn machine out with overuse. Will try new discs first, then will treat myself to a new one with a hard drive if problem persists.
I bought a DVD set (Auf Wiedersehen Pet) that the previous owner had left covered in sticky fingerprints - I think they handled them with jammy fingers:D. I cleaned them with washing up liquid and dried with kitchen towel, they were perfect after that.
Yes, but I thought I had read somewhere that box set DVD's are different to DVD-RW, which is what I use. Could be wrong?
In that case buy a CD/DVD lens cleaning kit. Run it a couple of times to clean the lens.
Try the new discs.
If all is OK, then you know the issue. Just look after your discs better.
Recordable discs need a bit more care than commercial discs (but you should still care for your commercial discs). Namely, hold the disc by the edge and centre hole, try not to touch the recording surface. Always store the discs in their cases, if you bought a spindle tub of discs try and get hold of some proper CD or DVD cases to keep the ones you have used in. If they get fingerprints on them use a soft, lint free cloth. A spectacle cleaning cloth is great for this. Wipe from the centre to edge, never around the disc.
For really icky fingermarks etc. make up a very weak solution of washing up liquid and water and again, gentle wipe from the centre to the edge of the disc. You can dry them with a lint free soft cloth too.
The laser bounces light off this layer to read the disk and a detector feeds the received digital data to the rest of the circuitry. The metal layer of a commercial disk is several times more reflective than the dye layer in a recordable disk.
This detector has a threshold below which it starts to misread the data. Obviously with a recordable disk having less light bouncing back off it you are working much closer to that threshold than with a commercial disk. So as the laser power degrades over time and use you hit that threshold earlier with recordable disks than commercial disks.
The other issue is as the laser wears out it becomes less able to burn data to the disk, so you get more and more failed recordings.
They are completely different - going back to CD's it was something like commercial CD's reflect back 90% of the laser light, CDR's reflect 40%, and CDRW's only reflect about 10% back - it's why most CD players wouldn't play CDRW's.
But even home produced recordings can take a lot of scratches if they're not following the data track in a circle. I've experimented adding scratches with a screwdriver to my own dvd recordings. So long as the scratches run across the data track from inner to outer edge you can keep adding scratches until it looks like a Jackson Pollock before it stops playing. In contrast one short scratch following a circular path can ruin the disc.
Part of the testing procedure for CD players was to modify a commercial disc by sticking a piece of PCB tape (I can't remember the exact thickness now, something like 0.9mm?) from the centre outwards.
In order to pass the test it had to play it flawlessly.
It's scratches round the disc which cause the problems.
Is that the case with cleaning them though as long as you avoid scratching them? The dye presumably is not on the surface but under a polycarbonate layer just like a normal DVD. Even with a scratch if the scratch is enough to divert the laser beam it will do that on a commercial DVD as well.
I would be more concerned about storing the recordables than cleaning them, they really shouldn't get scratched or need cleaning especially since most people don't buy or rent second hand recordables whereas it's common with commercial discs.
Yes the error correction can easily cope with short bursts of errors as in a radial scratch but a circular scratch will also take out the data used to correct the errors (or negates the interleaving).
Even if your recorder works with DVD+RW discs, sometimes it happens that not all brands will work, so to be on the safe side, better use DVD-RW's.
One symptom of which is taking longer to read the disk properly. The machine has to identify what type of disk it is and then what is on the disk. If the laser is failing the data it gets back from the disk can be corrupted even though the disk itself is perfectly fine. It's just being misread. The machine will try multiple times to read the disk usually hence why it seems to be taking a long time to load the disk compared to one it can read properly first go.
It would take too long to explain the differences between + and - recordable disks. And probably get way too geeky in the process. If you are interested there are plenty of articles in Wikipedia and other online resources that go into all the gory details.:D
But if the machine only supports -R/RW disks then no point buying +R/RW disks as they more than likely won't work.
Just checked the specs of the LG and it supports both + and - formats so should be OK with +RW disks.
Yes, I did check LG Manual, and it says both types of disc are compatible, but I have a sneaky feeling that at one time I bought +RW and they wouldn't work,. I understand what you're meaning about the difference between commercial discs and recordable discs, so if laser is failing , I guess it's not worth while forking out for new discs, I think it has had it's day. Thanks again.
In your original post you say "they have all been used but not excessively". What exactly do you mean? How many full recording cycles have they been through? I find after about 5-10 cycles they start to play up. I don't bother with -rw discs much though, dvd-r discs are so cheap and for me if it's worth recording it's worth keeping.
Also, has excessive wiping caused any blemishes on the surface? If you hold a disc up to eye level at various acute angles with a dull light source in the background can you see any dull fogged areas on on what should be a perfectly glossy surface? A laser/lens will have trouble seeing through such patches.