Apple Updates SuperDrive Firmware

mmarlett writes "(Potentially) In your software update panel: 'The Power Mac G4 SuperDrive Firmware Update installs new firmware on the SuperDrive which addresses an incompatibility with 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW media, and the 2x SuperDrive in the Power Mac G4. You must perform this update if you intend to use 4x DVD-R or 2x DVD-RW media in your Power Mac G4. This update also enables you to eject audio CDs that are copy-protected or have mastering errors. This update is required only for the Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio), the Power Mac G4 (Quicksilver) and the Power Mac G4 (Quicksilver 2002) with an internal Apple SuperDrive.'"

Comments

That should be rephrased:

[Anonymous Coward]

"eject audio CDs that are copy-protected or have mastering errors" should be "eject audio CDs that are copy-protected or have other mastering errors"

Copy protection

[Draoi]

This update also enables you to eject audio CDs that are copy-protected or have mastering errors.

A bit redundant, that last part .... ;-)

Re:Obviously..

[Draoi]

What's the DMCA got to do with burning DVDs on a Mac??

Sorry, I completely missed your point. Did you mean the MPAA?

Re:DRM

[Draoi]

Copy-protected (read 'broken') CDs had a reputation for getting stuck in Mac CD-ROM drives. Check out this old story for more detail. Why would you want to turn this off?

As for DRM - I'll believe it when I see it ....

Um, no

[daveschroeder]

No, it's not "sneaking" anything in. This is Apple's packaged version of Pioneer's firmware update fixing the now-well-known issue with not properly handling high speed media.

And uh, it ejects copyrighted CDs because it can't recognize them, since they don't conform to the Red Book Audio CD specification, not because it's trying to prevent you from using them. In fact, your premise is laughable, since if Apple really was in bed with the DRM crowd as you seem to suggest by your innane statement, then Apple WOULD support copy protected CDs, effectively furthering the potential for marketplace acceptance. By NOT recognizing copy protected CDs, it's actually doing the anti-DRM crowd a great service by refusing to bend over to support these "CDs".

And finally, Apple isn't "cozy" with the DMCA at all. It was the quickest path to get a vendor from illegally distributing iDVD, which is Apple proprietary material, with OEM CD-RW/DVD-RW drives. Though the DMCA may make us cringe, Apple was 100% in the right:

Reason enough is that there is no legal way for anyone to obtain iDVD without buying a system from Apple that has a SuperDrive in it. iDVD is not free; it is included ONLY with these systems and there is no other way to obtain it. Therefore, this vendor distributing (or encouraging the illegal acquisition of) iDVD at all is already illegal, and Apple had every right to stop it. (There are several other reasons, such as maintaining a single, predictable, known set of hardware that iDVD runs on to keep the best possible user experience for such a critical product, but the fact that no one else can legally distribute iDVD, nor can they ask customers to illegally obtain it, is reason enough.)

Re:Um, no

[Draoi]

It was the quickest path to get a vendor from illegally distributing iDVD, which is Apple proprietary material, with OEM CD-RW/DVD-RW drives.

Not just iDVD, but a patched version of it. No wonder Apple were pissed off ....

Re:Um, no

[Melantha_Bacchae]

daveschroeder wrote:

> And finally, Apple isn't "cozy" with the DMCA at
> all. It was the quickest path to get a vendor from
> illegally distributing iDVD, which is Apple
> proprietary material, with OEM CD-RW/DVD-RW
> drives. Though the DMCA may make us cringe, Apple
> was 100% in the right:

Even if Apple would have been in the right, I still don't believe Apple even made the threat. All we ever got was the other party's word (no posted copies of actual documents), and that word changed from the original story a few weeks before.

The original story was that Apple had asked *nicely* for him to stop distributing iDVD with his drives that competed with the SuperDrive, and he agreed to keep good relations with Apple. It was weeks later that the story broke again, this time with him claiming Apple had used the DMCA.

This struck me as a smear campaign on his part to blacken Apple's good name. The DMCA is a bad law, and it gives any company fool enough to use it plenty of bad PR.

Apple does not deserve this. Steve Jobs is one of the very few leaders of the computer industry to actually stand up to the RIAA and MPAA for his customers. He is the only one with the courage to do so during his Grammy Awards acceptance speech:

"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."
Steve Jobs, 2002 Grammy Awards

Re:Um, no

[dhovis]

I believe that ultimately the issue was one of patent licencing fees.

Apple has to pay a fee to include an MPEG-2 encoder in iDVD. Apple recoups that fee when you buy a Superdrive equipped Mac. Apple could sell iDVD, but that looks bad when all the other iApps are free. Plus it is a support nightmare for Apple. As far as Apple is concerned, if you want to burn DVDs on a non-Apple DVD-R drive, you can use Toast Titanium, or you can shell out for DVD Studio Pro ($1000).

This applies to Quicktime, too. If you want an MPEG-2 encoder for Quicktime you have to buy it ($20). That cost is above and beyond the Quicktime Pro cost (which includes MP4).

Re:Um, no

[dhovis]

Whoops, scratch that bit about Quicktime. There is a $20 decoder for MPEG-2 for sale, not an encoder.

Re:Um, no

[dhamsaic]

The company was distributing a patched version of Apple's proprietary software. iDVD is not free; it is included with the price of a SuperDrive from Apple. The license agreement states that it may not be redistributed, and Apple was not receiving royalties for the patched distribution. So yes, that was illegal.

Furthermore, how would you feel if someone was taking your work, modifying it and then selling it? You don't receive any royalties, sure, but more importantly, they are modifying your software. Who knows what kind of problems that could cause? Now something minor gets broken and Apple has to spend thousands of dollars supporting a problem that wasn't introduced by their engineers. Not only that, but now their software looks like a shoddy hack job.

You can't spin it so that Apple was in the wrong - it's just not happening. They were in the right, period, and that's the way it is.

Re:Um, no

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The DMCA is a bad law, and it gives any company fool enough to use it plenty of bad PR.

Not to start a flame war, but the DMCA isn't anywhere near as bad as most Slashdotters make it out to be. I've seen instances here of people saying things would or might be illegal under the DMCA that have nothing to do with that law. I'd suggest everybody-- opponent, proponent, whatever-- take a few minutes out and actually read the thing. It's not long. And while you're at it, you can invest a little more time and read all of Title 17. It's amazing to me how many people have the wrong idea about what the copyright laws actually say.

Just read the laws before forming an opinion, that's all I suggest.

Re:Um, no

[Twirlip of the Mists]

they were "Right" to restrict their software so that other manufacturer's DVD burners couldnt be used with Apple's burning software?

Yup. Apple created iDVD, so they could choose which DVD players would be supported. Hell, if they'd wanted to, they probably could have done it by individual serial number. It's their software, so they can do whatever they want with it.

You can complain about it, of course, but nobody will pay any attention to you. To Mac owners who bought SuperDrive-equipped machines, iDVD is free. It's not available to anybody else. So you don't have much ground to complain.

They were "RIGHT" to leverage their software to increase their hardware sales?

Sure. Apple's been doing that since 1984. Apple is a hardware company, but the only reason-- well, not the only, but by far the best-- reason anybody buys their hardware is because of the software that runs on it. You can't run OS X on a Toshiba laptop, and you can't run iDVD with a third-party external DVD burner. That's Apple's way of doing business. If you don't like it-- though you'd be in the minority-- you're free to buy somebody else's stuff.

They were "RIGHT" to RESTRICT FUNCTIONALITY of their product to suit their needs?

You kinda lept from A to C without going through B first, here. How is supporting only a limited set of DVD burners restricting functionality? It's no different than when any computer software works with only a limited set of computer hardware.

That said, Apple would have been entirely within their rights to restrict the functionality of iDVD. In fact, in many ways, they have. iDVD is a consumer product, designed to be easy to use but not especially powerful. DVD Studio Pro, on the other hand, is designed to be more complex, but a lot more powerful. iDVD could, in theory, do everything that DVD Studio Pro does. But Apple decided to deliberately restrict the functionality of iDVD to keep it simple. So yeah, if this had been a restricting of functionality, Apple would have totally been in the right to do it.

You make as good of a product as you can, for the lowest price you can.

On what planet? On this one, you make a product that's as good as it has to be, for as much as people are willing to pay. That's how you stay in business. Apple has demonstrated repeatedly that their standards are higher than a lot of other software companies'; even Apple's free software is better than most comparable commercial products in the Windows world. But that doesn't mean Apple is running a soup kitchen. It's a business, not a charity.

Making a product CRAPPIER to make another product sell better does not help the consumers at all!

Better bring Mercedes to task, then. They sell the crappy E-class, just so people who don't want a crappy car will buy the S-class. For that matter, Boeing is really on my shitlist, too. They sell the crappy 737 just to boost sales of the 747 and 777. And what's with IBM selling all of those crappy Intel-based servers? They should be selling mainframes for $20 each with lifetime warranties! This process of selling a crappy product for less money-- or, in the case of iDVD, even giving it away-- has got to stop!

And keep trumpetting until the RIAA and Micro$oft lobbies have managed to buy all of your rights out from under you.

Okay, you've officially dropped off the deep end here. I kinda regret spending this time responding to your other points, because it's only now, when I see the last couple of lines of your message, that I realize you're kind of an idiot.

Oh, well. Maybe somebody else will read and be enlightened.

Re:Um, no

[red5]

Apple could sell iDVD, but that looks bad when all the other iApps are free.

Not really you can buy iMovie 2 from them if it didn't come installed on your mac.

Re:Um, no

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The iDVD program was restricted in order to leverage sales of their internal DVD burners.

I think you typed "restricted" when you meant to type "created." Apple wrote iDVD-- or paid to have it written, which is effectively the same thing; I'm not sure if that program was developed internally or not-- so that people would have an easy way of creating DVDs out of their home movies and whatnot. They did this because many people wouldn't have bought Macs with Superdrives otherwise.

They didnt SAVE ANY MONEY by NOT DEVELOPING THAT PART OF THE PROGRAM, because the patch to allow external DVD burners took one person 3 days to write.

They saved three man-days of effort, and a huge amount of QA time. Apple would have had to test the entire iDVD function suite for every external drive they wanted to support. That's a serious investment of time and energy. So yeah, Apple did save money by not writing drivers for third-party drives. But that's not the point. The point is that Apple wrote iDVD specifically for people who have Macs with Superdrives. It's not for people who have Macs with other DVD burners, or people who have Macs without DVD burners, or people who have Commodore 64s with floppy drives.

See this is the problem with America, everyone thinks that the most profitable approach is "Right" or "Justified" and a-o-k.

See, this is the problem with people like you. (Far be it for me to generalize. Your problem cuts across boundaries of race, class, and nationality. Idiocy is color-blind.) You think business in inherently evil just because it creates inequities. Lots of uninformed people hold that opinion, but they're mistaken.

Yeah, and I'm totally off the deep end to think that corporate lobbies are buying our rights away, right? Even if it is an exagerated take on recent events, how dare you stifle that sort of thinking?

I think you typed "stifle" when you meant to type "ignore." And I think you typed "thinking" when you meant to type... I don't know. Something else. Because "thinking" has little to do with the things you're saying here.

Re:Um, no

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Yawn. Yet more ranting from a paranoid lunatic. Okay, "mary_will_grow," you win. Business is evil. Businesses are trying to subjugate us and open up a new era of slavery to the corporations. There are no shades of gray here; business is just absolutely immoral and bad. We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers.

You first. I'll be right behind you.

Re:Um, no

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Why, when someone questions Corporate America's motives, do people people tend to respond with "WELL THEN LETS GO BACK TO BEING HUNTER/GATHERERS" ?

Because you're advocating an extreme, and unjustifiable, point of view. Rant all you like about how the corporations are trying to conquer the world, but be prepared to listen to the sarcasm and mockery the follows.

I agree that I've sounded a little crazy....

A little crazy? Listen to this: "What if it really does get *bad* and everyone is too afraid to speak up for fear of people like you calling them crazy?" Or how about your assertion that "corporate interests" are "attempting to buy our rights away." The kicker, of course, is this: "Why stick up for big business? It HATES you."

You're suffering from paranoid delusions, mary_will_grow. You really might want to consider seeing a doctor. Thorazine can work wonders.

Re:Um, no

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Doesn't that at least make you CONCERNED?

Nope. The business of America is business. What Enron did was against the rules, but it's an accounting practice found in virtually every company in America. Enron was used to set an example. Any other company would have served just as well, but they picked Enron. And while it certainly worked-- practices nationwide are being reviewed and revised-- was it really worth it? Enron is gone. Andersen is gone. The pensions of thousands of people are gone. What a horrible price to pay for what was basically a difference of opinion over the interpretation of the ledgers.

If you took the time to educate yourself a bit, I think you'll find that the world is not as scary as you seem to think that it is. Stuff doesn't happen by conspiracy of the oligarchy. Stuff just happens, by accident, by coincidence, by pure dumb luck.

Doesnt that at least make you CURIOUS?

Again, nope. It's not unusual in the slightest. Defense is a private industry. People in that industry should act in their own best interest. If things like this didn't happen, I'd be curious.

YOU, who is beligerently opposed to ANY DISCUSSION ABOUT CORPORATE AMERICA'S INTERESTS.

I'm not opposed to discussion. I'm opposed to senseless rants. Like this one you're having right now. They bore me because they're all vitriol and no facts. Calm down, drop your faulty assumptions, and go do some research. When you have more facts, come talk some more and we'll have a discussion.

Re:DRM

[bailey34]

Why would you want to "turn off" the eject copyrighted CD "feature"? This is a bug fix whereby if you had inserted a crippled CD, there was no software method for you to eject it. It isn't a copyright thing.

Not for everyone

[ekrout]

I searched Google news and found some interesting information.

Apparently, for this firmware upgrade, Mac OS X 10.1 or later is required.

There is no indication from Apple of similar updates for SuperDrive-equipped 17-inch iMacs or Power Mac G4s. The company makes it clear in the documentation that this update is intended solely for 15-inch flat panel iMacs equipped with SuperDrives.

So, be sure to realize this update isn't for anyone and everyone with a SuperDrive.

Re:Not for everyone

[tbmaddux]

This is for PowerMac G4s (Digital Audio, Quicksilver, Quicksilver 2002). The flat-panel iMac update has been out for weeks. The 17" iMac already has the update, as do the Mirrored Drive Doors PowerMac G4s. You can get at them both, along with all the details, here:

http://www.apple.com/hardware/superdrive/

... as well as through Software Update. The update requires a reboot.

How about one for the DVD/CD-RW drive in iBooks.

[shippo]

I have an iBook with a combined DVD/CD-RW drive, and this has problems handling CDs with mastering errors.

I had one CD that due to a pressing error had a large blob of paint on the reverse side. I inserted it without checking the underside, and then had severe problems attempting to eject the disk. I had to reboot and hold down the trackpad button to get the disk out.

I've also got an audio CD that isn't copy-protected, but has a hidden track at the start. This too appears to lock up the drive, and won't eject without a reboot or a bent paperclip.

Re:Um, yes

[EricWright]

You're both confused. iMovie is for creating movies by offloading clips from your DV (and maybe other formats) Video Cameras. iDVD is for authoring (and burning?) DVDs. DVD Player is what you use to watch a DVD.

Re:How about one for the DVD/CD-RW drive in iBooks

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

I've seen the same thing. The latest "Queens of the Stone Age" locks up the iBook, but my two G4's have no problem with it.

Even a manual eject left the iBook in a state where it couldn't read any CD.

I'd love to apply this firmware update, but I've got a hacked firmware that makes the DVD player region-free. It also looks like nobody is interested in making a new region-free ROM image based on these latest firmware changes.

Re:Um, yes

[dalassa]

Yeah, you're right. Teach me to post before i've had a shower.

Re:Um, yes

[HiredMan]

Let me get this straight - you read /. AND you shower? Are you sure?

;)

=tkk

PS Where's that guy with the flamebait .sig: "OSX is Unix for people who bathe regularly." when you need him?

Re:How about one for the DVD/CD-RW drive in iBooks

[Van Halen]

I'm curious - did it just lock up the drive, or did it actually make the system become unusable? I've seen the latter happen with a malformed mixed-mode CD (I was working on creating one and it took a couple tries to get everything right). Didn't crash the OS, but might as well have. I couldn't start new gui programs but I could ssh in ok. However, sudo reboot would never actually reboot the machine - it would take down most processes and then hang waiting for something (presumably in the CD I/O subsystem). Basically I had to hit reset at that point.

When I got my CD burned properly, it was no problem. But even with bad data, the system should never hang like that, so I hope they will fix it! (yes, I submitted feedback about this, but I suspect it's not the most direct path to the developers involved)

Re:Um, yes

[dalassa]

Read /., shower, and I'm female. The impossibilities keep piling up.

Re:How about one for the DVD/CD-RW drive in iBooks

[Twirlip of the Mists]

To me, this posting is evidence that we Mac users frequently don't appreciate just how good we have it. (i.e. Having to hold down the trackpad button, while restarting the computer is considered "severe.")

Hear, hear. Of course, to be fair, on a PC you could probably just press the "eject" button on the drive itself to get the disc out. But "eject" buttons are so 20th century....

Re:Um, yes

[tm2b]

iYou're iRight.

iSorry.

Re:How about one for the DVD/CD-RW drive in iBooks

[shippo]

In both cases the system became virtually unusable. I'm not on a private network so I couldn't try ssh to shut the machine down. It's as if the CD drive is sending multiple spurious interrupts back to Mac OS X. I've not tried either CD with Mac OS 9.