DVD writers locked at 2X

jamcas wrote on 2/28/2004, 2:19 AM
Did you know (or notice) that DVD writers are deliberately locked at 2X when it comes to ripping a DVD to your HDD ?

I found this website that discusses DVD writer firmware and they have Firmware for a pioneer drive that has been hacked and removes the 2x limitation so you can rip at higher speeds like a DVD ROM drive does.

FYI the sony DVDR drives firmware is encrypted and hence there is no hacked version of the firmware that unlocks this facility.

I wonder if this feature is something to appease copyright control associations that police DVD movie IP ?

http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=22380&highlight=pioneer+hack

Jc

Comments

farss wrote on 2/28/2004, 2:40 AM
Would seem a very obscure way to stop you stealing something!
Sort of like filling the rooms of your house with foot deep treacle, maybe slow the crooks down enough so the cops have time to get there?

But maybe there's a technical reason for this although I cannot be certain. CD-Audio disks have much less error correction than CD-ROM and hence cannot be read as fast, maybe the same applies to DVD-Video although I'm fairly certain that's not the case. But I have noticed exactly what you're talking about, didn't stop me stealing my own authored DVD though, just gave the thought police a bit of a head start.
roger_74 wrote on 2/28/2004, 5:41 AM
My Plextor does this too. They say it's because people don't like the noise the DVD makes at playback. Also, it would get quite hot after watching a three hour movie.

However, this isn't logical to me. Why would you watch a movie on a burner? And why can't I turn it off easily? You can turn it off with AnyDVD, or in the case of my Plextor 708A, hold down the eject button a few seconds when the tray is closed and empty. The next time I insert a DVD video I get full speed.

All in all, I don't think it's a big deal.
riredale wrote on 2/28/2004, 12:18 PM
The burner wouldn't get hot at playback, especially with Pioneer products where there is a small fan mounted inside the back of the burner.

I have a high-speed CD burner, and last year when I burned dozens of CDs at 48x continuously the disks would come out very warm to the touch. Eventually the laser began to fail intermittently. I backed off the burn speed to 40x, and things were fine after that.

I suspect the real reason for the throttled ripping is to make life a bit harder for the mass-duplicators over in Asia. On any street corner there you can buy a duplicated copy of a Hollywood movie for just a dollar or two. It would make a big difference to them if your burner took one hour or 15 minutes to rip a movie.
TVCmike wrote on 2/28/2004, 2:41 PM
This reminds me of the old joke where the guy goes to the doctor and says that his arm hurts when he lifts it above his head, at which point the doctor says "well, don't lift your arm above your head."

In like fashion, I don't advise people to use their writer to do any kind of ripping work. One of my clients has a Lite-On DVD-ROM that is used only for reading discs. It rips DVDs extremely quickly. I'm sure that the burners are purposely crippled but buying a cheapo DVD-ROM might actually be your best bet in this instance.
riredale wrote on 2/28/2004, 4:40 PM
Based on reading this thread about an hour ago, I surfed over to a Pioneer flash download page and pulled out a version that unlocks the 2x reading speed for my Pioneer 105 drive. Took about two minutes to install it. I then tried it out on "Titanic," a 7.5GB dual-layer disk.

Results? The whole disk took about 16 minutes to rip using SmartRip. The old way would have taken over an hour.

I should have done this last year!