The cover image is published by Tibor Janosi Mozes on Pixabay.
I suddenly wanted to burn some games and animations onto discs, and maybe later make some electronic albums and commemorative videos, and give them as gifts to friends. It feels very meaningful. So I eagerly bought a Blu-ray burner and Blu-ray discs, and started trying to burn them. I encountered many problems along the way and wasted a total of 12 25GB discs (such a waste), but I have currently burned two games and decided to record the entire process.
Optical Drive and Discs#
I bought an external HP Blu-ray burner TS-TB23L, which is a relatively cheap model but has good quality and can ensure stable 4X speed burning.
I bought 50 Ritek BD-R Blu-ray discs with a capacity of 25GB each, which should be enough to burn a complete season of an animation or several movies. However, it is still advisable to buy different capacity blank discs to accommodate different file sizes. Also, since I bought write-once discs, if a burn fails, the disc is essentially wasted. So if you are trying to burn for the first time, it is recommended to buy RW discs, which are rewritable discs. Although they are more expensive (the capacity of a single CD-RW disc of the same price and quantity is only 700MB), even if the burn fails, you can erase and rewrite, avoiding waste.
Burning Software#
At first, I chose UltraISO, which I had purchased before, as the burning software. It worked fine when burning a game called "约战", successfully closing and verifying the disc. However, when I tried to burn another game, although the final closing was successful, I couldn't read the disc afterwards.
So I looked it up and found ImgBurn, an open-source burning software. After trying it out, I found that it retries when writing data fails during the burning process. It only disconnects after twenty consecutive failed attempts to write a group of data. This greatly increases the success rate of burning. However, I also encountered burn failures after many attempts.
I initially thought it was a hardware problem, but since I had successfully burned before, I couldn't jump to conclusions so quickly. Therefore, I decided to conduct an experiment to explore the reasons for the burn failures.
Investigating the Reasons for Burn Failures#
First, I set the image cache to the E drive and made sure that the image size was smaller than the available space on the C drive to avoid the objective reason of insufficient cache space causing burn failures. After thinking it through, I designed the experiment by comparing different burning software and different external working environments, following the principles of control and single-variable to identify the cause.
Optical Drive and Other USB Devices Working Together#
Burning with UltraISO#
Just at the beginning of the burn, a message popped up saying "NO ADDITIONAL SENSE INFORMATION" and I couldn't continue writing. There was a small circle of burned marks on the disc surface, but I couldn't write any more data into it. A disc wasted.
Burning with ImgBurn#
Better than UltraISO, but it still kept retrying and the image was not written completely. There were obvious signs of burning, but in the end, it was still a wasted disc.
Only the Optical Drive Connected#
Burning with UltraISO#
Successful burn + verification passed. After ejecting and reinserting the disc, it can still be read and written normally.
Burning with ImgBurn#
0 retries! The whole process went smoothly and the burned disc can be read normally.
In conclusion, after wasting a total of 12 25GB Blu-ray discs, I finally analyzed and summarized the reasons for the burn failures:
Who would have thought, it was insufficient power supply!
Yes, although the optical drive can work with the mouse when reading discs, during burning, because the optical drive and the mouse together occupy all three USB ports of my laptop, the power supply to the optical drive is insufficient when using the mouse. This leads to burn failures with UltraISO and ImgBurn retrying 20+ times. After unplugging the mouse and burning, UltraISO can work normally and ImgBurn's retry count remains at 0... (😭😭😭 sob sob sob, my twelve discs)
Burning Results#
The burned "约战" disc (no autorun.inf set, so all files can be seen when opened):
The failed burned discs:
(Left: Disc failed at the beginning of burning with UltraISO, Right: All wasted discs)
Future Plans#
I can set an autorun.inf file in the disc, so that the optical drive can display the corresponding icon when reading the disc, and directly open the exe file when the user double-clicks, according to the configuration. The specific settings are as follows:
Since I bought blank discs, I plan to get a disc surface printer in the future to print disc covers and store them in my own disc cases.
Next, I plan to burn some movie sequels, complete seasons of animations, and movies to free up space on my computer's hard drive.
Reference Article:#
Burn exe files to discs in Windows 10, run exe directly when inserting the disc