Posted by Henry Nettles on 05/02/06 23:18

On Mon, 01 May 2006 15:50:47 -0700, Voinin <vboing@boing.biz> wrote:

>Silicon Sam wrote:
>> Yeah, I have some TY made Sony's rated at 8X that will burn at 12X.
>> Speed is no concern to me, so all mine get burnt at 4X. Just ordered
>> 300 of the TY 4X's from Meritline. They support 8X burn as well. Free
>> Shipping, they work out to around 24 cents each. TY is supposed to be
>> the benchmark in blank DVD's
>>
>> I have a PC and a Mac, so when my PC is duping a DVD, I flip the
>> switch and use the Mac in the meantime.
>
>My question wasn't so much if you could burn them slower or anything
>like that. What I want to know is what criteria do the manufactures use
>to determine max burn speed of a disc. I generally burn at 8X on all
>discs that support faster speeds.

By "manufacturer", do you mean disc manufacturer or drive
manufacturer? The company that manufactures the discs rates them for
a maximum speed, primarily based on the dye. The drive manufacturer
uses an eprom on the drive to store the "firmware". Embedded in the
firmware is a list of "MEDIA ID"s. For instance, the Taiyo Yuden 8x
DVD-R media referenced above has a MEDIA ID of "TYG002". The drive
reads this information from the blank disc, and then matches the MEDIA
ID against a table stored in the firmware. Based on this table, the
drive knows that it has two write strategies for this particular blank
disc, a 4x write strategy and a 8x write strategy. These "write
strategies" are also stored in the firmware, which is why it is
important to be sure your DVD recorder has the latest firmware.

[Back to original message]