MooMooMooMoo

MooMooMooMoo

I use a ton of flash drives for hi-res music dl's played through my Oppo. In my experience, we're seeing the same decline here as in disc quality. At this time the Corsair Slider is the only semi budget Flash Drive I will buy. Previously reliable brands Lexar & Sandisk have especially turned to garbage in my experience.

MooMooMooMoo

I'd love to rip my cd's for a major downsize (I have 5300 TITLES on ?10,000? discs), but the time involved would be prohibitive. I'm slowly replacing my 44/16 with official hi-res downloads that I put on Flash & back up to multiple hard drives.

MooMooMooMoo

agree. I still have a few old Plex Premiums & 40/12's. I need to get some ide/Sata adaptors & start using them again!

kahuna

10-15 years ago I brought all the FujiFilm Taiyo Yuden Dvd-r 50 spindles I could find. The ID code was TY01. A few times BB had them on sale for $9.99 a spindle. I brought everything they had in stock at the time. Probably ended up with 50 spindles total after the sales. Then they disappeared from the shelves.

I then jump on the Sony 50 & 100 Dvd-r spindles also Taiyo Yuden & made in Japan. Of course these also disappeared from the stores every where. These were only on the five Panny dvd recorders I had brought I own.

I could of brought Taiyo Yuden from Supermedia website but shipping was a killer to HI. Back in the day I brought some crap media from Computer City/Comp USA. There house brand was "Princo". All of those in less than a year or 2 ended in the landfill. What a waste of some good Korean Dramas with english subs.

I think I also have maybe 12,000 discs in my bedroom & closet.

MooMooMooMoo

I've had a bunch of Comp City Comp USA cdr's go bad. They were garbage.

Josh-da-man

Most store brand electronics are crap, aren't they?

morriscroy

As a general broad brush statement, I would probably agree.

Though in the rare case, there may be some exceptions. As an extreme case for example, rumor has it various BestBuy store brand standalone bluray players were possibly region free where the original manufacturer didn't bother to correct the "mistake". (Unfortunately these models don't appear to be manufactured anymore. It was tempting to buy one at a local liquidation outlet).

morriscroy

Case in point.

I don't purchase many flash drives. But recently I've been coming across too many "lemons" which are DOA. (ie. They don't even work straight out of the box).

Until recently, I've mostly been purchasing sandisc packages of three 16gb flash drives from Costco, largely because they're relatively inexpensive and Costco has a "no questions asked" return policy.

Every time I buy new flash drives now, I immediately do a full fledge format to see whether there are any bad sectors. For example (besides the DOA lemons), I have encountered new 16 gb flash drives which were completely dead after a few gigabytes. One drive even choked at 64 megabytes! (This crap went back for a refund at Costco).


Really lousy quality control indeed.

BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!!!

morriscroy

For that matter, the computer dvdr drive market has also declined significantly over the past 5+ years. Excluding the rebadgers (ie. Asus, "Plextor", etc ...), for example Sony discontinued the Optiarc back in 2012.

For non-slim internal dvdr drives, there's only really three manufacturers left: LG, LiteOn, and Samsung. Of these three companies, Samsung/TSST recently filed for bankruptcy, while LiteOn has largely disappeared from local computer stores. (No word on when the next LiteOn updated dvdr drive will start showing up on computer store shelves).

Somewhat sucky that LG might very well be the last man standing, when it comes to current dvdr computer drives. In general, I thought LG drives were largely crap, despite being still widely available.

jjcool

I was in the local microcenter for something else recently and went down the optical drive aisle. There were very, very few offerings. I couldn't find one blue ray drive for example. Not a recorder, just a read only drive.

morriscroy

It's even worse for computer bluray drives.

At this point in time, there's only one company that is still making non-slim computer bd-r drives: LG.

Samsung, Sony, LiteOn, etc ... already exited that market.


For external bluray drives, Samsung and Pioneer are still making new drives. (In addition to LG).

Not a whole lot else left.

Josh-da-man

Blu-ray in PC never really took off.

I suspect it was because of too much copy protection and DRM on purchased discs, and the recordable discs were too expensive. With HD and flash prices dropping like a rock and increasing in storage, there's not much advantage to burning anything to discs.

Optical discs in PCs are going the way of the 3.5" floppy.

morriscroy

One big impediment was Microsoft supporting hd-dvd a decade ago, in a largely half assed manner. MS Windows never had a native bluray player.

By 2009, copy protection wasn't a barrier anymore for blurays. AACS and BD+ were largely cracked by then.

In hindsight, I'm guessing Microsoft supporting hd-dvd was their way of muddying up the market and giving the middle finger to Sony.

For the most part. Easier to just buy inexpensive flash drives or larger capacity external hard drives.

One recent nail in the coffin is the native dvd player program being completely removed from the generic Windows10.

jjcool

Well that certainly sucks.

Josh-da-man

Maybe. But Microsoft's media player has been shit for years. I use VLC for playing video files and DVDs and WinAmp for music. (Though it's very rare that I plat DVDs on my PC. I'll occasionally use it to check a disc or something, but that's it.)

I'd wager that most people who play media on their PCs use third party players.

kahuna

I had 100's of Comp USA Dvd -/+ r dvds go bad also. Most of these were manufactured by Princo or Optodisc.

morriscroy

Blah. (More rambling).

The computer optical drive market is slowly dying. Though this shouldn't be too surprising to anyone.

No more Samsung/Toshiba manufactured drives on the shelves of local computer stores. Not surprising either, considering the Samsung/Toshiba TSST operation filed for bankruptcy back in 2016. (Newegg doesn't even carry TSST dvd drives anymore. Only third party dealers).

Just noticed recently that ASUS is no longer "rebadging" LiteOn dvdr drives. I dropped by a local computer store and picked up a new ASUS generic dvdr drive, which from appearances looked like an LG rebadge. I did some further checks (ie. extracting firmware, various code numbers, etc ...), and concluded that is was most likely a dvdr drive manufactured by LG. The only thing good I can say about it, is that this ASUS version does not have the aggravating "jamless play" LG behavior.

For that matter, I haven't seen any LiteOn manufactured drives (whether real or rebadged) on the shelves of local computer stores, in over a year or so. (The last few LiteOn drives I purchased a year ago, was at a local computer store chain which filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of this year).

Also noticed Pioneer doesn't manufacture their own dvdr drives anymore either. Apparently Pioneer's current dvdr drive model on the asian and european markets, is basically also an LG manufactured rebadge.

So if there's a "last man standing" in the computer optical disc drive market, it is LG manufactured drives with its own fatal diseases!

morriscroy

The next "shoe to drop" will be whether Pioneer still continues to manufacture their own computer bluray drives. (LiteOn and Samsung exited the computer bluray drive market a long time ago).

Pioneer's bluray drives have been their own designs based around Renesas chipsets. (LG previously used Renesas chipsets for their dvd and bluray drives over the mid-late 2000s, until 2010 when LG changed over to Mediatek chipsets).

Recently I have noticed at several nearby local computer stores, the current Pioneer bluray drive models (ie. BDR-209DBK ...) have been dumped into the clearance "dump bins". What exactly this means, I have no idea. I do hope that Pioneer makes another bluray drive model based on their own design.

What would be really crappy is if Pioneer abandons their own computer bluray drive designs, and starts outsourcing to LG to manufacture their bluray drives. (ie. Rebadged LG manuactured drives with a "Pioneer" named pasted onto the front bezel of the drive).

morriscroy

In the case of LiteOn, currently it appears they are still manufacturing rebadged drives for VinPower. (VinPower are specialists in the cd/dvd/bluray duplicator burner market).

(I have no idea if LiteOn is still manfacturing generic dvd drives for anybody else).

Apparently what VinPower has been doing, is licensing old beloved cd/dvd drive brand names like "Plextor", "Optiarc", "PioData", etc ... and pasting these familiar brand names onto the front bezel of LiteOn manufactured dvdr drives. (Basically they're practicing "studebaker marketing").

http://duffy.agency/zombie-marketing...rom-the-grave/
https://www.fastcompany.com/1776395/...remembers-them

No idea how successful VinPower has been with this style of marketing. I doubt anybody who is tech literate, would be fooled by this new branding of Plextor, PioData, or Optiarc.

morriscroy

This evening I was doing some cleaning and found an old stash of blank cdr discs. As far as I can figure out, it was some old Ritek junk from 2001 or 2002.

I decided to see whether they were even still usable, by writing some music.

Blah. No go.

My current cd/dvd drives (LiteOn, LG, Pioneer, TSST, etc ...) don't seem to like these old Ritek discs at all. They created 5 coasters, and on one drive (a recent LiteOn) didn't even recognize it at all (ie. no disc in drive, etc ...).

Over the years I remember vague rumors about some newer cd/dvd drives dropping support for really old cdr/dvdr discs which have stopped being manufactured a long time ago. I think this is the first time I ever came across it in practice.

(Currently I don't have any really old cdr/dvdr drives to test whether they can still write to these really old Ritek discs).

Blah.

Alan Smithee

My outboard Pioneer Blu-Ray drive seems to be dying, mostly due to me not taking very good care of it. Guess I should get another while I still can. Don't want to buy anything from LG until they make 3D displays again. Never had any problems with blank discs of any kind, other than a CD-R in the car skipping a bit after being kept in the car for a few years through all kinds of weather, tons of other CD-Rs in the same binder are still fine though.

morriscroy

I have no idea what Pioneer will do next for their computer bluray drives. I only notice what shows up in the local dump bins, whenever I shop at nearby computer stores (or bestbuy, etc ...).

IIRC, this current Pioneer BDR-209DBK internal bluray drive model first appeared on local computer shop shelves back around January 2017. A week ago or so (circa August 2018), this same model is now clearance "dump bin" fodder.


For over a decade, what made LG's dvd drives really trashy for ripping dvd discs is the "jamless play" feature. It has been a standard feature on LG's sata dvd (and some bluray) drives since 2007/2008. If you have never come across "jamless play" in action, it is very aggravating when you first encounter it.


CDr/DVDr discs which are already burned years ago is usually not an issue, unless the original blank discs were garbage to begin with.

The issue I'm talking about is using really ancient blank cdr (or dvdr) discs with a recently manufactured dvd drive, to make new burned discs with content.

morriscroy

If you insist on boycotting LG, there isn't much left to buy in regard to computer optical disc drives.

Pioneer bluray drives use Renesas chipsets. IIRC, Renesas was partially owned by Hitachi. LG computer optical drives turns out to be a joint venture between LG and Hitachi named HLDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi-LG_Data_Storage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renesas_Electronics

So depending on how much non-LG "purity" you're demanding, it will be a very tall order to boycott LG completely and absolutely when it comes to computer bluray drives.

As far as I can figure out, LiteOn appears to be largely independent of LG. Unfortunately LiteOn stopped manufacturing bluray drives many years ago.

Other than fishing around on second handed markets (ie. amazon, ebay, etc ...) for an older LiteOn or Samsung/Toshiba (TSST) bluray drive, nowadays it would be difficult to find a brand new bluray drive which is not "contaminated" by LG.

morriscroy

In the case of VinPower, it appears only their dvd drives are manufactured by LiteOn. These LiteOn rebadges are the ones which are sold under licensed brand names like "Plextor", "PioData", or "Optiarc" (as mentioned in an earlier post).

VinPower's bluray drives appear to manufactured by LG, judging by the folks who are experts at crossflashing firmwares.