Help me chose burner.

ECB wrote on 9/25/2005, 8:38 AM

I have a Plextor 708A, Plextor 716A and BenQ 1640 and all run fine with Vegas 6c and DVDA3c. I have used Plextors since they made their first ATAPI dirve and I have never had an incompatibily issue with any of them. The BenQ had such rave reviews and the ability to change the book type I had to try one. So far the reviews were correct. :) Plextor is a signator to DVD+R consortium and as such does not support changing the book type for +R DVDs. Plextor does set the book type for DL+R to DL-ROM. BenQ allows you change the book type of all +Rs to -ROM for compatibility to older stand-alone players.

Ed

johnmeyer wrote on 9/25/2005, 10:15 AM

Have you written to Sony tech support about this? (Use the Support link at the top of this page). There is no excuse for all major brand burners not being fully supported at this stage of DVDA's existence. I know they worked hard to fix burner support problems, and I think they would be willing to work with you to find a fix to your current problem. Unless you need to replace the drive for other reasons, I'd contact Sony first, before you get a new one.

rsp wrote on 9/25/2005, 11:22 AM

Using a NEC2500 and (sofar) no problems in Vegas 6c or DVDA3c and am planning to upgrade to a NEC 3520 or 3540. However after reading your message i would be interested to hear if others also have trouble with those newer NEC burners!

Rudi

ECB wrote on 9/25/2005, 1:08 PM

Darryl,

John makes a good point... contact Sony tech support before you replace the drive.

Ed B

DGrob wrote on 9/25/2005, 3:33 PM

I first contacted Sony Support on July 16 with both e-mail and a purchased support contact. They had promised some files from "engineering" to import and feed them info (following a modified dll file fix that failed). The latest contact, after a few weeks of silence, was an inquiry into whether V6c and DVDA3c fixed it, neither see the drive.

Darryl

jabloomf1230 wrote on 9/26/2005, 2:48 PM

Keep your NEC burner. Just use DVDA3 to "burn" the DVD to a temporary file with the DVDA3 ISO Image Writer and then burn the ISO image with Nero.

The reasons for DVDA not recognizing burner or not burning properly are so myriad that you are wasting your money to even take the chance that a new burner will cure the problem. It may have nothing to do with your NEC burner and something to do with the overall hardware and software configuration on your machine. For example, I have a very new high end PC and I discussed this issue with Sony Support. Neither a Pioneer DVR-109 or a LiteOn 1633 are recognized by DVDA3 and it doesn't matter what firmware, or hardware settings are used. It doesn't matter what drivers you use either. On my PC, Sony claims it is the RAID setup specific to my motherboard that prevents the drive from being recognized by DVDA3. Since there have already been 3 patches to DVDA3 without the burner being recognized, I've figured out that whatever burner recoginition algorithm is used in DVDA3, Sony has no intention of changing it, just to fix a few problems with some burners and some PCs.

klimvid wrote on 9/26/2005, 3:08 PM

I'll throw this out because it just might help - then again it might not. My Pioneer 104 would be recognized by DVDA 1,2,and 3 only if my Secondary IDE channel was set to PIO. If it was set to DMA the burner would not work.

I have the Pioneer 110D now and it is recognized by DVDA 3 with IDE set to DMA but DVDA won't burn DL. I finally caved and bought the cheap ($30) version of Sonic RecordNow to burn the DL files prepared in DVDA.

DGrob wrote on 9/26/2005, 6:02 PM

Pardon my lack of expertise. You can burn from an ISO image? I've been "preparing" the DVD to a file, then importing and burning the files with Nero Recode. I looked around Nero support for ISO, but frankly, ain't there yet. Please explain. Darryl

ScottW wrote on 9/26/2005, 6:50 PM

The full version of Nero supports ISO files; look for buring a disk image, change the filename extention from IMG (in the file selection) to ISO and Nero should burn it fine.

If you want to just burn the files directly, don't use recode, just select "burn video files to DVD" in the smartstart menu.

DGrob wrote on 9/27/2005, 6:25 AM

Thanks Scott and jabloom , et all. Very helpful advice and feedback. Darryl

ECB wrote on 9/27/2005, 7:11 AM

Unfortunately, by not burning with DVDA3 you loose the option to select DL+R layer break location with the very slick abstration layer inplementd by Sony. Sony took the setting layer break, seen as complicated or involved by many, and made it a very simple process. If you ever used Gear software to set the layer break you would know exactly what I mean.

Ed B

DGrob wrote on 10/1/2005, 9:33 AM

Update. Just got a query from Sony Suppot that I do a complete and total removal of DVDA3c and Vegas 6c - including deleting the folders and registry entries. Which I did.

Clean reinstall of Sony - no change. Both still don't see the NEC 3250. Bit of a pain having to rebuild my prefs from scratch again. sigh. Darryl

johnmeyer wrote on 10/1/2005, 10:05 AM

Tech support people that tell you to completely uninstall and then re-install everything should all be shot. It reveals a complete lack of understanding of how their own products work. Worst of all are the ones that want you to fdisk, reformat, and reinstall Windows and then install all your applications all over again. Right. I wonder how many millions of man-hours incompetent tech support people have wasted.

By contrast, the good ones can tell you what registry setting to remove, or what hardware is conflicting, or which version you need to be running, etc.

DGrob wrote on 10/6/2005, 5:44 PM

Update. Sony Support just requested an "> %windir%\system32\systeminfo.exe > c:\si.txt" file. Which I have provided. I'm encouraged that there appears to be action directed at correcting the problem.
Darryl

rsp wrote on 10/6/2005, 11:54 PM

That's good news indeed!

DGrob wrote on 10/22/2005, 1:06 PM

Sony Support just sent me an updated .dll file - voila, DVDA3 sees and burns my SL DVD at 8x on my previously invisible NEC 3250A! Going to try DL soon.

FWIW, Vegas 6c still does not see it to rip, however. So, I've sent back some additional log files as requested by Support.

I'm really impressed. Might take a while, but Madison/Sony have obviously been at work - for little ol' me. Thanks Sony. Darryl

jabloomf1230 wrote on 11/11/2005, 2:36 PM

Just an update. Sony Support sent me some debug-level DLLs to test why DVD3A couldn't see my burner. These DLLs produced log files and I sent them back to Support. So I'm a little more hopeful that this will be resolved eventually.

DGrob wrote on 11/12/2005, 4:48 PM

My NEC 3250 is solved. Both DVDA3 and V6c see and perform all CD and DVD burning and ripping tasks - pretty quickly I might add. Darryl

jabloomf1230 wrote on 11/21/2005, 9:36 PM

Just another update for all you "DVDA can't find my burner" fans. The new DLLs allow me not only to find my Pioneer 109, but also to burn. Unfortunately the whole process stalls at 99% when burning the lead-out. Sony is back to the drawing board, but at least I'm making progress.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 11/21/2005, 10:02 PM

Well my situation is worse. NONE of my Sony products can see either my Pioneer 110D nor my Samsung CD-RW drives! So I have two different burners and neither of them show up in DVDA 3, Vegas 6, Sound Forge 8, ACID pro 5, nor CD Architect 5.2. Yet ALL of them work in Nero, DVD Movie Factory 3, & InterVideo Disk Master 2.

One of these posts said that Sony had a problem with nVidia chipsets on the motherboard which pretty much rules out all SLI motherboards!

~jr

jabloomf1230 wrote on 1/4/2006, 11:36 AM

Just to let you all know, Sony support is persistant. Today they sent me a revised file to replace one of the DVDA3 files and now I can burn with DVDA3 and my Pioneer 109 drive. My thanks to Kimberly and everyone else at Sony for fixing this problem.