On Mar 8, 2011, at 6:38 AM, Jonathan Smith wrote:
I have a 17" powerbook G4 1.5 with the MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-825
superdrive.
I am not a frequent burner of dvd/cd's. But I am used to more modern
drive which don't fuss over what type of media you use.
According to it's specs, it reads dvd full stop and burns - and +.
I have had it reading from cd's and dvd's, I have yet to burn from it
though. But it will not recognise a particular dual layer dvd+ I have
burned. It just spits it out. It also spits out a blank disc of the
same kind.
I have read elsewhere that apple recommend TDK. Have I read correctly,
that these drives are fussy and only like certain brands of disc?
Also, should I be ok to read and write to dvd+ dual layers and if so,
which work for you best?
Don't know about media, the specifications of the UJ-825 say that it
can both read & write DVD+ dual-layer media, so this appears to be a
problem with the drive or the media type, most likely the media I'd
guess?
With respect to media, there are several different dyes used in
different media brands. I've had excellent luck with Verbatim discs
that use the darker dye rather than the cheaper discs with the lighter
dye. Cheap discs seem to fail at a high rate. One thing to consider,
there is supposedly such a thing as a dual-layer rewritable disc which
I've never used, but sounds intriguing if you could actually rewrite
these up to 1,000 times. I'd be surprised if you could rewrite a
single time, but I have very limited experience with rewritable discs,
perhaps they work great?
I've seen that back in 2007 someone created a patched firmware for
this drive that enables RPC1 "region-free" usage for this drive so
that it can play discs from all regions. Normally region-free flashing
isn't necessary any longer because VLC can play discs from all regions
without flashing, but this particular drive seems to be special and
doesn't work region-free with VLC according to information on this page:
<http://www.pinoymac.org/forum/archive/index.php?t-18462.html>
Flashing a drive in a Mac may be impossible or difficult. I don't see
a Mac flash program, but it may be possible to boot the Mac into
Target Disk mode and attach the Mac to a PC via a Firewire cable and
then flash the drive from the PC using the Windows flash program (I
don't know if it supports Firewire flashing, so this may be a waste of
time?). If you can't flash it using a PC with the Mac in Target Disk
mode the only alternative would be to remove the drive and place it
into a PC which seems too difficult for a laptop.
Also, finding the patched firmware may be difficult, and it also my
remove the "Apple" from the identifier, which probably isn't an issue
if you're using 10.4.11 or 10.5.8, but may require "PatchBurn" if you
have any lower level OS.
Here's a page about the UJ-825 patched firmwware:
<http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=43012>
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