Re: [Dvdrtools-users] Re: [Fwd: Re: Is my MSI DR8-A2 broken?]

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 09:15 +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> You are probably right. I did try to burn a 4.4GB image with dvdrecord
> to a DVD-R with a corrupt disk as result.

Again, 4.7GB = 4.35GiB.  You probably ran out of room if it's 4.4GiB
(which most OS/utilities report as 4.4GB, but GB = 2^30, not 10^9).

> DRV+R does not work, right?

Understand there is more than just the formats.

DVD Consortium (Pioneer, Matsushita, Toshiba, etc...) firmware designs
are different than DVD+RW Consortium (Sony, Philips, HP, etc...).  It's
a very, very long and drawn out story.

Although most DVD Consortium drives also do DVD+R/RW today, and most DVD
+RW drives do DVD-R/RW today, the firmware/command sets are _different_.

CDRecord was designed around the existing, "byte-by-byte" (character)
record mechanism, which DVDRecord (CDRecord 1.x), CDRecord-ProDVD
(CDRecord 2.0) and CDRecord+DVDpatch (CDRecord 2.0) are all based on.
CD-R can work that way.  DVD-R can work that way.  DVD+R can_not_.

Now Jorg has added limited block writing to CDRecord-ProDVD as of 2.0.
This is DVD+R/+RW drive support for _only_ when using DVD-R (and
"record" emulated DVD-RW) media.  With 2.0a11, he has added experimental
support for DVD+R (and DVD+RW) on Ricoh firmware DVD+R/RW drives.

Pretty much _all_ drives today are supported with block writing at the
kernel level.  CDRecord design is not designed for such.  I'd really
have to go back into the history of CD/DVD drives, as well as the Linux
kernel development.

Long story short, until about 2003/2004, most "player" devices didn't
have the "brains" to read arbitrary media formats, track/sessions and
filesystems.  And prior to about 1999, most recorder devices didn't
either.  Once block write (again, circa 1999+) and player block
reading/media virtualization (again, circa 2003+) became commonplace,
then block writes could be done, and read by players.

I still prefer CDRecord in Disc-at-Once (DaO) or Session-at-Once (SaO)
modes, with burnproof _off_, with CD-R and DVD-R because it produces the
most universally compatible and longest lasting recordings.  But I
agree, for common use, it's overkill as of 2004+.

> I've seen on the web that some burners don't work well in placed on a
> slave position.

ATA DMA modes were _never_ designed to have more than 1 device on a
channel.  The master/slave design is a legacy EIDE approach that ATA
drives only support for backward compatibility.  Unless both devices are
in PIO mode, expect to have DMA performance and other compatibility
issues -- especially if they are not the exact same vendor, let alone
model sometimes.

> Furthermore, the image I tried to write was on the same
> IDE drive. Obviously problems can occur with DMA transfers, reducing the
> speed greatly. In any case, the resulting DVD-image should not be
> corrupt, would it?

Yes, it can be if there is a bus timeout -- which exponentially
increases if you have 2 different ATA DMA devices on the same bus.

> On the problematic burner, I even tried an audio CD.
> The result was that the CD was unplayable, extreme lagging, multiple
> songs at once, etc. The burner has now been returned, using the two year
> warranty from MSI. 

Recording to CD-RW or DVD-RW in emulated CD-R or DVD-R modes,
respectively, can reduce both recorder and player lifetime.

And don't get me started on using standard CLV CD-RW media in
Sony/Philips CAV CD-RW (what I retroactively call CD+RW ;-).  I've seen
people utterly destroy their drives in no time doing such.

At least with DVD-RW and DVD+RW, you _know_ they are CLV and CLV-Z,
respectively.  With CD-RW, you can really cause some damage if you use
CLV media in a CAV mode.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:address@hidden
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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