The cover image is published by Tibor Janosi Mozes on Pixabay.
Suddenly, I wanted to burn some games and animations onto CDs, 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 difficulties and wasted a total of 12 25GB discs (such a waste), but I have successfully burned two games so far, and I decided to record the entire process.
Optical Drive and Discs#
I bought an external HP Blu-ray burner TS-TB23L, which is relatively cheap and has good quality, ensuring 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 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 disc fails to burn, it becomes useless. Therefore, 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 with the same price and quantity is only 700MB), even if the burning fails, you can erase and rewrite them, avoiding waste.
Burning Software#
Initially, I chose UltraISO, which I had purchased before, as the burning software. It worked smoothly when burning a game, successfully closing the disc and verifying it. However, when I tried to burn another game, although the disc was successfully closed, I couldn't read it afterwards.
So I searched and found an open-source burning software called ImgBurn. After trying it, I found that it would retry when writing data fails during the burning process. It would only disconnect after 20 consecutive failed attempts to write a group of data. This greatly increased the success rate of burning. However, I encountered burning failures even after many attempts.
I initially thought it was a hardware failure, but since I had successfully burned before, I couldn't conclude so early. Therefore, I decided to conduct an experiment to explore the reasons for the burning failures.
Investigating the Reasons for Burning Failures#
First, I set the image cache to drive E, and made sure that the image size was smaller than the available space on drive C, to avoid the objective reason of insufficient cache space causing burning failures. After thinking, I designed the experiment by comparing different burning software and different external working environments, following the principles of control and single variable.
Working with the Optical Drive and Other USB Devices#
Burning with UltraISO#
Just at the beginning of the burning process, 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. It wasted a disc.
Burning with ImgBurn#
It was slightly better than UltraISO, but it 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.
Working with Only the Optical Drive#
Burning with UltraISO#
Successful burning and verification in one attempt. After ejecting and reinserting the disc, it could be read and written normally.
Burning with ImgBurn#
0 retries! The whole process went smoothly, and the burned disc could be read normally.
In conclusion, after wasting a total of 12 25GB Blu-ray discs, I finally analyzed and summarized the reasons for the burning failures:
Who would have thought, it was insufficient power supply!
Yes, although the optical drive can be used with the mouse when reading discs, during burning, because the optical drive and the mouse occupied all three USB ports of my laptop, the power supply to the optical drive was insufficient when using the mouse. This led to the burning failures with UltraISO and the 20+ retries with ImgBurn. After unplugging the mouse and burning, UltraISO worked normally, and the number of retries with ImgBurn remained stable at 0... (😭😭😭 sob, my twelve discs)
Burning Results#
Burning of the game "DATE A LIVE" (no autorun.inf set, so all files can be seen when opened):
Failed burned discs:
(Left: Disc failed to burn with UltraISO at the beginning, 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 double-clicked according to the configuration. The specific settings are as follows:
[AutoRun]
open=exe filename
icon=icon filename
Since I bought blank discs, I plan to get a disc printer in the future to print the disc covers and store them in my disc case.
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 Articles:#
Burning exe files to discs in Windows 10, running exe directly when inserting the disc