Comparison of DVD error checking tools

[avsgenie]

Hi,
Excuse my ignorance. I'm rather new to this game. I was wondering what the difference between the various disk checking utilities was. I had been under the impression that for home users the only options were kprobe, and more lately plextools. But I noticed in the last couple of days that Nero CD-DVD Speed Disk Quality Test and DVDInfo Pro both offer PIE, PIF, POF and jitter tests for compatible hardware.

So my questions are why are Nero and DVDInfo not used more commonly here and in other forums, especially as they can be used with a greater variety of hardware including less expensive DVD-ROM readers, and how can one most easily find out what hardware they are compatible with - my ageing LG DVD-ROM only supports PIE/PIF/POF?

[Ian]

For many its personal preference. Others, its due to compatibility. At least with Lite-On drives, KProbe and CD Speed (and maybe DVDInfo) give very similar results since they use the same API's.

Here's a list of drives supported by CD Speed:

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=cdspeed30.html

[Halc]

kProbe IMHO has:

- best UI
- most easily readable graphs
- dynamic scalable window with user seletable colors

Also, it started the thing first (in terms of mass availability), so that's probably the reason why it's still number 1.

Also, there are a lot more LiteOn enthusiasts out there than there are BenQ, Plextor, BTC, Philips, Toshiba, Ricoh, AOpen or LG enthusiasta (imho).