For our DVD reading tests, we used a variety of ABEX Test Discs to measure the drive's performance.

ABEX TDR-820 (Single Sided Single Layer DATA)

The drive reads in CAV the disc, starts from 3.37X and ends at 8.26X.

ABEX TDR-840 (Single Sided Dual Layer DATA)

Again the drive reads the disc perfectly, it starts at 3.37X and ends at 8.16X. at both layers.

Accesstek PTP ROM-9 Test disc DATA

Again similiar resutls with another PTP DVD-9 test media.

Accesstek OTP ROM-9 Test disc DATA

No issues with OTP DVD-9 ROM media as well.

Matrix Movie (DVD-9 VIDEO Disc)

DVD-Video can be read at 2.9X average reading speed with a maximum of 4.0X, it seems that the drive has limited its "ripping" DVD-Video abilities.

- DVD Error Correction Discs

For all our DVD Quality Measurements we set reading speed for all media at 8X, while Jitter for LiteON drives set at 4X under the OptiDriveControl software. Some explanation for the below measaurents follows and in general users should look at the trend of the error rates, rather than actual numbers. Note that usually higher reading/scanning speeds give higher error rates as well.

PIE (Parity Inner Errors) - exist on all DVDs and are nothing unusal. Normally the error correction of the drive can handle this. This test counts how many errors in a continuous set of 8 blocks occur (pisum8). If too many PIEs occure in a matrix line, so that the error correction can not fit any more, it is called a PIF. The highest possible value for PIE sum is 1664. The maximum value based on the recordable DVD specification for 8 blocks is 280. This table is for beginners and only for approximate orientation - it should only show tendencies. This is not a generally valid stencil. The orientation values of the table rely on errors, which are consistently dristributed on the DVD. There are also no hard crossings between the border values of the quality areas.

PIF (Parity Inner Failure) - means that there are too many PIEs , so that the error correction of the drive can't fix it any more. PIFs are counted separately for each block (pisum1). The highest possible value for PIF is 208, but the maximum value based on the recordable DVD specification for one block is 4.

POE (Parity Outer Error) can occur when the Parity Outer Layer is trying to correct Parity Inner Failure. The dvd spefications does not give any absolut value like it is known from PIF. If POEs can't be corrected this results in a Parity Outer Failure.

POF (Parity Outer Failure) are uncorrectable Parity Outer Errors. DVD specification doesn't allow any POF. They normally result in so called CRC errors - uncorrectable errors.

ABEX TDR-821 (Single Sided Single Layer Scratched Media)

The drive reports a perfect reading CAV curve. As it shows below, there are sveral PIE and PIF error correction (articificially placed) that is not a serious problem for the drive's error correction abilities. PIE error are kept low when the media is not scratched and got high peaks when the PIF errors are also high. No POF (unreadable area) reported.

Using another utility called QpxTool we have also similiar results even results are presented in logarithmic scale for better understanding the PIE/PIF error area

ABEX TDR-825 (Single Sided Single Layer Defect Media)

The drive doesn't seem to have any problem with the TDR-825 disc, it shows a perfect reading CAV curve as well. The reported PIE/PIF values doesnt affect the reading speed, since all error are being corrected from the drive's internal error correction/

ABEX TDR-841 (Single Sided Dual Layer Scratch Media)

Using the ABEX TDR-841 media, we got very good reading speeds. The drive does report back several PIE/PIF errors but as expected doesnt seem to affect the drive's performance at all.

ABEX TDR-845 (Single Sided Dual Layer Defect Media)

The drive has excellent reading curves for both layers. The PIE/PIF scan doesnt show significant errors through the whole surface.

ABEX TDV-541 (Single Sided Dual Layer Scratch Media)

The TDV-541 disc seems to struggle the drive with serious speed dropdowns after the 3.0GB till 5.0GB, where all the articial scratches are placed. This also was confirmed from the disc quality test as well.

The QpxTool scan seems to stopped after starting the second layer...

ABEX TDV-545 (Single Sided Dual Layer Defect Media)

As happened with the TDV-545 test disc, the drive after 3.5GB till 4.5GB, due to the high articial errors present on the disc, forced to lower its reading speed to read the contents. At the disc quality test, the drive lowers its reading speed after the 4.0GB mark towards the end of the disc.

Summary of Testing pressed DVD/DVD-Video defect/scratched media discs

From the above tests, it seems that the HLDS portableDVD drive is capable of high error correction, since managed to perform very well in all of our tests, even had to drop reading speed with some test discs. The reported errors are kept in managed levels and the drive will not have serious issues reading even slight scratched media.