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Upgrade Doubles +R Speed For Some Lite-On Drives
Binsbergen writes "Owners of a Lite-On 451S (lowest price $ 69.50) and a Lite-On 851S can load the firmware of the Lite-On 832S and burn their DVD+Rs at 8x speed and also write to double-layer media. Before this seemed impossible, because many manufacturers have told us that upgrading a 4x drive to a double-layer writer was impossible due hardware differences. Of course it's important to note that 'overclocking' voids your warrantee and should be done after have carefully read the instructions. Read more about the procedure, the results and others experiences in the official 451S@832S, 851S@832S -- It works! thread. That's a dirt-cheap upgrade!" (Sounds similar to the NEC upgrade mentioned in May.)
Sort of off topic, though i'm talking about LiteOn
Who are the other major manufacturers of DVD writers? Not the rebranded ones, be careful here, since Sony for instance gets most of their drivers from LiteOn. I am just wondering if anyone has had success writing DVDs with a non LiteOn drive.. because I've gone through 2 LiteOn RMA's and they make shit IMO. Either that or South East US got a bad palette of them...
While the speeds are finally getting there, i think i'll hold off a little further on buying a DVD-RW. I'm also a little angry about the supposed 'dual-layer' capability - regular dual layer discs are 9.6 gb, not 8.5!
Aren't the Sony DVD writers just a re-packaged Lite-on? Or vice versa? Pretty much the same writer I read somewhere, just comes with a different logo and software package.
Oh for FUCK SAKES
Stop spreading these MORONIC "the discs go backwards so piracy is un-possible" rumours.
The Xbox does not spin backwards, nor read inside-out. It uses drives that are as close to stock as you can get, regular toshiba, phillips, samsung drives with modified firmware. It has a proprietary game format. There's a short video session (a video clip saying "this is an xbox game not a movie you idiot") which is all your PC will see, since it does not know about the format of the disk. This COULD be overcome in software, but it would be difficult and would require hacking the firmware of some PC drive and writing all the filesystem shit, etc..
Anyways.
Gamecube discs do not spin backwards, nor PS2, nor dreamcast, nor Sega Saturn, nor TG-CD. This rumour has come up about every single disc-based game console to date.
It would require refitting media pressing factories, custom mastering equipment, etc, etc, all KINDs of ridiculous infrastructure, when if the purpose is copy protection, existing schemes work great (usually broken by a weak link elsewhere, ie; bunnie lifting the MD5 key to decrypt the xbox' bios - if that hadn't happened, it would still be "unhackable")..
Anyhow... THE DISCS WORK LIKE EVERY OTHER DISK, THEY JUST HAVE STUFF WRITTEN ON 'EM THAT YOUR COMPUTER DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT!
Ahhhh... One of those lame rumours that supposedly "intelligent geeky" people spread.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I have been a HUGE supporter of Lite-On drives for quite a while for this very reason. They are notorious for being easily flashed to higher read/write speeds with out any issues. I pity those fools who pay top dollor for $ony drives when they could just buy the exact same drive from Lite-On for a lot less.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
The Xbox does not spin backwards
Wrong. The Xbox DVD drive does indeed spin backwards. One of the things you have to do when swapping in a compatible replacement drive (Samsung, I believe) is to flip have the rubber drive band so that it causes the spindle to spin backwards. Go to xbox-scene.com and dig around in the hardware modding tutorials for more details.
Well before the 401s came out, there were rumours - originating from "usually well-informed sources" - that there would be a "leak" to allow it to burn DVD-R media (the 401s is a DVD+RW drive).
And, yup, that's exactly what happened. Yes, DVD-R support is still somewhat shaky and, the whole thing is mostly a result of volounteer work. But Lite-On has, at least from what I hear, been pretty supportive.
Lately though, they seem to have pulled the plug because of pressure from other manufacturers and patent attorneys (those drives are officially DVD+R drives so Lite-On would not be paying royalties to use the DVD-R standard).
My girl-friend does this all the time: when she goes grocery shopping she will usually take advantage of those buy-three-get-one-free deals. Even on stuff like milk. So we'd have four jugs of milk sitting in the fridge. Eventually we'd throw two away - resulting in a net loss. But at the store, it actually felt like saving money.
Is this going to allow perfect DVD rips then or is this dual layer support proprietary to computers? i.e. Can you play these dual layer discs in a normal settop DVD player without doing something odd like flipping over the disc halfway through?
Close.
The discs should be readable in standalones, however the disc capacity is very slightly under the capacity of pressed DVDs. I think it comes out to 8.5gb as opposed to 9gb. So if a disc uses its entire capacity, you'll still have to use something like DVD Shrink, but you'll still see better quality. Most likely you'll be able to only shrink the extras and/or remove a sound track and have perfect quality for all the other audio and video.
I'm not sure what happened there. I might be tired, I guess.
I'd say DL is worth it for movies as it doesn't require recompression or stripping extras to fit a movie onto a single layered disc. It would make a good short-term video backup such that one doesn't have to risk damaging their original disc. Of course, such a use is technically illegal in the US. This would be a boon for DVD authorers, for amateur and small video businesses too.
I wouldn't trust it for a sole data backup because of a slightly higher error rate on the second layer.