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Hack? Hell, just buy a little box: http://www.cdrlabs.com/forums/strip-out-hdcp-with-gameswitch-ps3-s201-t23414.html

I also question whether the tax is actually collected on all imported media, since I pay 23 cents per CD-R at a local shop, and the tax is supposed to be 21 cents each, soon to be raised to 29 cents if it hasn't already. I have trouble believing the manufacturing, distributing, and retailing revenues total a mere 2 cents a disc.

It's not. The second link there explicitly says "blank audio recording media". There was an outcry when the levy was introduced on CDs since they were already heavily used for computer data. So there are two distinct-in-name but otherwise completely identical classes of CDs: CD-Audio and CD-R. CD-Audio is marketed for copying music CDs and CD-R is marketed for data. CD-Audio bears the levy, CD-R does not.

Also, blank cassettes bear the levy, but I do not believe that anything else does. Yet.

...Stu

As a professional your brother should be claiming CD-R's as a business expense anyway. I'm a sound tech who goes through 2-3 100 CD-R spindles monthly, entirely on content I record legitimately myself, much of it live demo recordings. I write it all off, so they can levy it all they want as far as I'm concerned. I also write off half my "entertainment" expenditures from every outing where I discus music with anyone, so roughly 45% of my restaurant/bar bills. It's quite an easy subject to bring up!

I also question whether the tax is actually collected on all imported media, since I pay 23 cents per CD-R at a local shop, and the tax is supposed to be 21 cents each, soon to be raised to 29 cents if it hasn't already. I have trouble believing the manufacturing, distributing, and retailing revenues total a mere 2 cents a disc.

As an artist who knows I'll never see dime of any such levy, it's pretty irritating. How the music industry is supposed to benefit by making internet traffic more expensive is beyond me. This is typical of the music industry's back-end approach to combating music piracy rather than the value-added approach which is generally the most successful.

Worse yet is the "SOCAN tax" for live performances. 3% of the pay for an artist or band is collected by SOCAN (Tariff 3A) to be redistributed to SOCAN members. If an artist or band plays all original music, they have to submit a setlist and wait to get that money back. If they play no original or SOCAN member compositions (i.e. all American-written songs) the collected money is basically swallowed by SOCAN. So the organization whose mission is to compensate Canadian songwriters for 3rd party performance and broadcast actually taxes Canadian performers unfairly and profits from the performance of non-Canadian compositions.

Fortunately, virtually no small live music venues across the country cooperate until they are compelled by SOCAN, and of the 200+ small venues I've played I've only encountered two such venues, one has since closed. So just avoid the Boar's Head Pub in Stratford Ontario and you're ok...

http://www.cdfreaks.com/
http://www.cdrinfo.com/
http://www.cdrlabs.com/

Reviews from people that actually understand the tech and know how to test it. Beware though, you wont get simple answers like "This one is best, buy it".

Besides being the least expensive choice in the review, it's also the only model of the four which is supported by K-Probe.

http://www.cdrlabs.com/kprobe/
or
http://www.k-probe.com/

And if you actually care about burners, read the reviews from a quality site that actually reviews virtually all the models, does far more exhaustive tests, and has a very active technical forum. CDR Info.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Home.aspx? CategoryId=1

MSI Have SATA CD/DVD ROMS

There's also the USB / Firewire options for initial setup for those who dont need optical drives in their mini PC's

Is there any software that allows you to check on the status of the dye layer? It would be good to know before hand that you're using nearly all the error correction on a disk so that you can replace it when you have the chance.

Yes. At least for DVDs. But you have to have a drive that supports it. Plextor burners typically come with software that can report error rates. Then there is KProbe for some other drives, read the docs for the details.

As a rule of thumb, when purchasing blank media, prefer "made in japan" over the others. But be careful, two otherwise identical looking spindles of blank media from the same brand may differ solely in the "made in japan" / "made in china" fine print.

Yes, but with current OS's, correctable erros are completely hidden from me. Only when the error is uncorrectable do I get a warning. There is no equivalent of S.M.A.R.T for CDs.

There are programs which talk to the drives at a low-level and report BLER and other error indicators (just one example: KPROBE. If you're doing data archiving, then get hold of these programs. If you're burning something to transport from home to work, don't worry about it.

I use and prefer Lite-On drives. They are cheap and standards-compliant. The same can't be said for Plextor (although they have improved in recent years).

What really put me over the fence for Lite-On is the freeware (closed source) program KProbe. This works only with Lite-On drives, and is only for Windows (unfortunately). Even though it is closed source, it is a free download (unlike Plextor's commercial utility).

The program KProbe seems to perform similar functions to what these Plextor utilities do: show the true low-level bit error rates of the disc, and allow certain drive settings to be overridden as desired (minimum and maximum speeds, DVD+R booktype, DVD region, and so on).

With the ability for end users to get at this information, it becomes possible to make informed decisions when buying blank DVD media.

If only these low-level functions were standardized, *sigh* -- it would be great if mainstream DVD and CD-burning software could use them to check disc reliability, and the OS could even inform the user if a disc were about to fail.

With more and more people storing home movies and other keepsakes on DVD these days, this will become more important. The ability to see this low-level info has saved me from losing data several times due to cheap media: beware "Great Quality" from Fry's!

Now, if only KProbe were open source....

CDRLabs has an article on TDK's "Armor Plated" DVD-Rs. They seem to hold up fairly well, but they're not indestructible. No word on how the dye holds up either.

TDK already makes scratch-resistant DVD-R discs. I've used them before and they're very scratch-resistant.

Yes, sites like CDRLabs, cdfreaks and CDRinfo should have better technical reviews. However, Anand has a shootout of several drives which makes it easy to compare them.

TDK Armor Plated DVD-R's with a scratch resistant coating have beeon out for awhile now. A bit pricey at over $2 a disc. But I can see them being worthwhile for important data. Review availble here: http://www.cdrlabs.com/articles/index.php?articlei d=23

There's tons of other burners that can do dual layer with unofficial firmware upgrades.

Even my el cheapo drive (Pioneer DVR-A06) might be able to do the trick, although I doubt Pioneer will release their hacked firmware for it just for the heck of it. ;-)

I once knew the link to pages summarizing the recorders where dual layer firmware was available but have lost it since then. :-( Maybe someone else can provide one?

Anyway, if your recorder supports recording 8x discs, chances are that it has a modified firmware for dual layer recording floating around somewhere, as one of the requirements -- a 140 mW laser -- is a common requirement for 8x DVD+/-R burning and DL burning. Philips has confirmed this, but says that in some cases the Optical Pickup Unit is still not of high enough quality. Obviously not always, since DL burning with modified firmware has been done by people upgrading their drives like this.

Finally, it's still a risky business and you might bust your DVD-ROM drive by upgrading to a hacked firmware. And I doubt warranty applies. ;-)

is here from CDRLabs.com

in response to all the threads about how this technology is going to be a "deadend" lets not forget who we're dealing with here. this isn't some company from bumfuck, idaho, its Sony. Knowing their history collaborating with Phillips, among other companies, i would not be supprised to see multiple vendor dd-r/w drives out later this year. hell, even if no other companies back the technology originally, Sony could still push this technology hard enough to succeed, after all, if they sell the media for the same price, and the drive (ok, don't tell me that they can't sell media costing them 5 cents to make for the same price as 7 cent/disc media ;), and the article states that the same laser technology is being employed, assumedly with a more accurate drive system, so the actual parts should be of similar cost for the drives) who's gonna choose a $1 650 MB disk over a $1 1.3 GB disk? basically what i'm trying to say is that the 2.88 vs 1.44 MB floppy-drive-failure analogy brought up earlier isn't very valid for two reasons. first, the importance of floppy drives was dimishing at the time, with no real need to have a 2.88 MB boot disk vs a 1.44 MB boot disk (hey they do the same thing, its not like i care if one can almost hold a better program while the other can't). CD drives are used for storage, and the need for storage is constantly growing, scalability at a cost is the name of the game. if we were to draw any analogy it should be between 720KB and 1.44MB floppy drives. they were accepted because 720KB wasn't enough for proper boot disks under many circumstances. go look at that 725MB movie file thats sitting on your hd cause its 5 MB past the 700MB disk overburn limit and tell me you wouldn't like to have that 1.3 GB cd. oh, plus, check the pic of this thing ... its silver!!@(*#%! ;)