Upgrade Your DVD Writer to Double Layer -- Maybe

Autoversicherung writes "Even if NEC tells you its impossible, German netzine Golem is reporting hackers have created an updated, unofficial version of the firmware providing DVD+DL (Double Layer) capabilities. Currently model 2100A and 2500A are patchable, more will hopefully follow soon. How cool, this enables me to skip an update cycle for burners!!" It's always fun to use the fish, and sometimes to void your warranty.

Comments

It looks to me,

[vyrus128]

between the babelfish translation of the article, and a few people's posts, that this is a case of "you get what you pay for." If NEC says you can't do it, maybe it's because you can't do it reliably; that seems to be the case here. I would question the feasibility of taking hardware designed for single-layer disks and using it for dual-layer burns, and indeed the article points out (in broken, babelfished English, but as best I can tell) that the resulting drives are flaky at best. My advice, though I support the development of open/third-party firmware in general, would be to skip this upgrade and go buy the real thing.

Re:It looks to me,

[darien]

I would question the feasibility of taking hardware designed for single-layer disks

Just a toy hypothesis: it could be that these drives are in fact internally identical to the dual-layer burners, and that it's only the firmware they ship with that's "designed for single-layer disks." Without a pair of units to compare I naturally can't test this theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if NEC had found it cost-effective to make all the drive units the same, and just charge a premium for the version with "unlocked" firmware. I'm sure someone will remind me when Intel did something similar with one of their processors - was it the 386SX?

I remember "overclocking" my 4x speed Ricoh CD writer to 6x speed using hacked firmware. Ricoh posted no end of dire warnings, but it worked, perfectly, forever (well, until a 6x speed writer was of no use to anyone any more).

It's true that these hacked drives do sound like they're prone to strange behaviour; but from the nature of the flakiness that sounds like the firmware isn't quite there yet rather than being a laser problem (e.g. the hardware no longer working as IDE Slave).

Just thinking aloud.

Why?

[pdxdada]

So if I have this strait this is a unsupported beta firmware hack to make a dvd drive write with unknown success to a dual layer media which isn't even available yet, will void your warrenty anyway and may kill your drive?

Cool! Sorry I'm a sucker for punkrock sollutions.

Re:Skipping update cycles, & drm.

[cujo_1111]

Ok, I'll bite...

Ummm... regarding your non purchase of a portable MP3 player or car stereo, why don't you go to a place where they sell these products and take a few mp3s with you and try them out? Seems like an obvious solution to me...

Score: -1, Paranoid Troll