DVD technology making me nuts

galt wrote on 9/19/2004, 8:28 PM

I have been trying to get a firewire DVD working on my laptop, and now I am 0/2. The latest is a Pioneer DVRS706, and all three tech support groups (Videoguys, Pioneer, and Gateway) were stumped and basically gave up. At this point I have updated everything (DVDA, frimware, chipset drivers, XP (thru SP1). So I am now facing the possibility that the real problem is DVD Architect. What gives with all the compatibility problems I find when I do a search here? Is this software really so fragile and poorly written? Does Sony really NOT provide a list of supported hardware? WTF are they thinking?

SO I do not know if it is the device that is bad, or if there is some inherent problem with my firewire (although it works fine for video capture). Hooking DVD burner up to USB port does not seem to help either, but real issue is how do I burn a DVD using DVDA ? DVDA just freezes as soon as I click the "burn DVD" button. Using included NovaBackup 7.1 software does not work either on USB, I have not tried it on Firewire.

Another odd thing is that the drive shows up on My COMputer as a DVD-RW drive. As soon as I put in a blank media, it changes icon to show a loaded DVD-R ( or whatever media is) , but changes the device type to CD-ROM. Then none of teh app programs can find a DVD burner when they try to run. No one I talked to had any clue about what could cause this.

Anyone here have any ideas? Is it likely the device is bad, or some kind of OS issue, or some issue related to DVDA?

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 9/19/2004, 10:15 PM

I haven't had exactly your problems. but my firewire DVD burner (Pioneer A04) is sometimes hard to find - I often have to power it up before booting the laptop, but that usually fixes it.

ScottW wrote on 9/20/2004, 5:01 AM

I've seen the symptoms of having a DVD-R in my drive show up as a CD-R (this in my laptop). This is some sort of bug in windows or the driver for the device; in my case usually a reboot with the proper media already inserted cures the problem.

Even though there's supposed to be a common interface specification, not all manufacturers implement it correctly (my guess is there's no one doing any third party conformance testing), hence a lot of the compatibility issues.

Another thing you can do is download a copy of Nero and see if it also has problems with the drives.

--Scott

dand9959 wrote on 9/20/2004, 6:58 AM

One thing I've noticed with DVDA (Studio):

When I put a DVD-RW into my burner, DVDA sees it as a DVD-R and won't continue (asks for a blank disc.) It doesn't matter if the disc is blank or not.

I had high hopes for this SW, but so far I'm not too impressed. Awesome interface and functionality...but weak on the disc management side.