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Thread ID: 15178	2002-01-31 01:07:00	DVD, CD-R recommendations	Guest (0)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
33652	2002-01-31 01:07:00	I am in the process of upgrading my home PC, which is now outdated and unreliable. A couple of the upgrades I am looking at are adding a cd writer and a DVD/CD drive. At this stage I have emailed various suppliers with what I am after and received replies that bring me no closer to deciding which is the best product for my money. The DVD/ CD drives offered from these suppliers are as follows: Liteon 16* DVD / 40* CD ASUS E616 Pioneer 16x DVD-Rom Samsung DVD After doing my own digging it appears the Liteon drive is a good product for the price, but that the other three are also good quality products, any ideas on which is best. The only stipulation I have is that the DVD drive must be able to be multizone and read all formats of DVD and CD including CD-R and CD-RW etc. My intention is to set my PC up so I can watch DVD's on my television and I don't want to be caught out with zoning issues as I have heard this has been a problem in the past. The CD Writers that have been suggested are as follows: Samsung Rewriter Liteon 24*10*40 CDRW ASUS 16X/10X/40XCD-RW Yamaha CRW8824S-VK SCSI Again, as with the DVD drives I have heard the Liteon CD writer is excellent value for money and also that both the ASUS DVD and CD writers are good, but have heard little if anything negative about any of the products. I have been told however that SCSI CDR's are better than IDE type products but are more expensive. Again any ideas on which is best? Interested in replies Richard	Guest (0)
33653	2002-01-31 01:55:00	I can't comment on CD writers, because I don't have one, but for DVD drives, if you want one to be multizoned, you'll have to do an internet search for the patch to multizone whatever drive you get - and if you can't find one then you'll have to go for a different drive. DVD drives cannot be bought multizoned anymore - they allow 5 changes to the zone, then they lock onto a specific zone (I think it asks what you want it locked to), but you can get firmware patches for *some* drives that don't allow it to lock onto any specific zone. Why do you think zoning should be a problem? Everything sold here in NZ will be zone 4, so unless you're going to be buying from overseas, this shouldn't be a problem. The government is cracking down on video stores renting out zone 1 DVDs now, so there's not going to be that many around for hire. The other thing to think about is that *if* you multizone your drive, it will involve flashing the firmware inside the drive itself, and this in turn will void any warranty you may have, and if it doesn't work properly it can make your drive stop working altogether. The last thing to consider (and I'm putting this in to avoid a big reaction like what we got out of e_name a few days ago) is the legal ramifications of multizoning your drive. There are some that say there's nothing wrong with it, and others that say its against the law. The zones are set up to somehow protect the movie industry (I have no idea how that works) and so you might want to look into the legality of it also. As for the drives, they're all usually quite similar - they all do the same job and you probably wouldn't notice much difference between them. What you do NEED to do though is find out which software works best for you and buy it - for example my DVD drive came with PowerDVD which is supposedly one of the two best DVD software programs around, but it just would not work with my drive (even though they came together!) so I had to get WinDVD which works brilliantly with my drive. I hope this answers some of your questions. Mike.	Guest (0)
33654	2002-01-31 03:37:00	unless you are going to be doing huge amounts of cd burning stick with the ide drives. i like the pioneer drive myself and if its the one i think it is there is a crack advailable. and before anyone starts jumping up and down about 'cracking' i have found it is needed. for some reason we get a lot of different zone dvd's, either hire or bought(why is it that 90% of the local vid shop dvds are zone1??). the worse case i had was 3 dvds all zone4 but each one required a different zone on the computer, go figure:-/ note to crack the dvd drive you need to flash it before your 5 times is up otherwise its permantly stuck on the last zone.	Guest (0)
33655	2002-01-31 09:54:00	As far as I am aware there is a prgram called DVD Region Killer at www.elby.org it lets you play any zone DVD on your comoputer regardless of DVD drive. Don't have a DVD drive, haven't used the prog, so don't quote me on it. JM	Guest (0)
33656	2002-02-01 09:18:00	I use Pioneer DVD 105S and I chose that one because it was easy to flash it with a new firmware to make it multiregion. That with DVDGenie, PowerDVD and you go anywhere. I really think that any new CDRW will make you happy, especially with such new speed... SCSI/IDE? Well, SCSI is far more expensive, but if money is not an issue, get ALL in SCSI (hard disk, cd-rw, dvd). The speed will be impressive as the SCSI controller takes care of all I/O on the drives, releasing the CPU from heavy tasks. But that is up to you. IDE with ATA 100 and more with Direct Memory Access have also improved a lot over the years. But if I had the money for it, I'll definitely go for SCSI. I used to have an old IBM SCSI 2GB drive with a pentium 120 (yes, old...) and an Adaptec UW 1964 or something like that. I still feel it was as fast or faster to access my data at that time than now with my 7200 rmp ATA 100 drive and AMD Duron 800!!	Guest (0)
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