Posted by Bob on 05/03/06 17:21

On Tue, 02 May 2006 18:18:52 -0500, Henry Nettles
<hnettles@hal-pc.org> wrote:

>>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.

You can get hacked f/w for most major drives that defeats that scheme,
allowing you to overburn. CDFreaks is one place to get such f/w.

But the experts warn you about overburning and even advise
underburning the 16x discs at 12x or even 8x. They recommend burning
8x discs at 8x. You not only want a burn that will Verify but one that
will last more than 6 months.





--

"A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
It keeps him upright."
-Robert Heinlein

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