Caught this today on a news ticker. Those of you with a Pioneer DVD burner might want to check it out.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/ap20020919_304.html

There's the possibility of destroying your AO4 or other burner when trying to write to 2x or higher speed discs.

for those who are alarmed, the danger doesn't appear to involve 2xDVDR, but 4xDVDR and 2xDVDRW. I've never seen any of those fortunately, but God knows I'll download the fix asap,

thx for that!

mark

I didn't want to undercut this helpful and important update...I just wanted to make sure people didn't get a scare that their 2xDVDR blanks would cause the fault.

Cheers and thx for the warning,

mark

And when you do apply the update you should make sure that your drive is not attached to an ATA100 or 133 controller. Mine is normally connected as secondary master on an ATA100. The update failed and erased the firmware so that the drive no longer functioned. I called Pioneer but they were unable to help. The next day I put the drive in another machine attached to a standard ATA port and ran the update again which completed successfully. My drive is now fully functioning again.

Hmmmmm ... on the European Pioneer site it said that Firmware 1.30 for the A04/104 (which is what came on the drive I bought 3 weeks ago) already contains the high-speed-disk fix. But I can see no mention of that factoid on the US site.

Can anyone shed any light?

I don't suppose all of this wacky fun means we can burn at 4x when the dust settles does it? It just means we won't pee our investment down the drain on a single disk?

mark

There's got to be a pony somewhere in this pile of horse apples.
A question, the major stores in the US are only offering R+ type DVD recorders for computers ie Best Buy, Circut City and CompUSA. They are selling both types of media for $6 bucks a pop. Any idea why? The number of units sold by pioneer look pretty good maybe it,s OEM business like Dell.
CaptKrunch

Don't know why plus seems to be offered more. I've seen that too, but since minus is the most compatible with DVD players, its irrelevant to me. My guess is that its use as data storage is more flexible in the plus version, and that is probably considered more valuable to the average consumer. They could be right.

mark

From what I can gather from the information this problem occurs when using the higher speed DVD-R discs. No using a 4x DVD-R disc doesn't mean you can record at 4x. The limiting factor is the hardware itself. I was more worried that some would buy the 4x medium (if they could find it) and either use it in hopes of getting better reliability OR faster recording with their current Pioneer DVD recorders. While it may indeed help in the reliability, of course it would not have any effect on the speed of the burn.

Those doing burns at normal 2x with those 4x discs are the ones who would most likely have problems.

I don't own a Pioneer myself, but hoped to warn some of the guys here who do and may not know about this. I guess if you stick to 2x discs you'll not have any problem.