Hi all,

I finally made a DVD+/-R,RW purchase - OptoRite DD0203. I read up on many reports and for the money it was the best deal for the features it has - especially HD-Burn. Burning a SVCD of 1.4G on a 700mb CD was very compelling.

But the recorder has a hard time with CDRWs and DVDRWs. It appears to see it, I format it with In-CD and it says it did format. Then the drive does not recognize the Disc. Any one with any experience with OptoRite ? Thanks

Babu C.

I don"t Know about the Optowrite But I have a Sony DRU-500A Dual Format burner and it doesn"t like certain Brands of Disks, I bought 20 of these Cheap DVD"s on E-Bay (Really Cheap at $7,95 for 20)They were generic Disks and some of them my DVD Burner doesn"t even recognize and the Ones it does recognize and burns ,those disks are unrecognizeable in anything and none of them play in My DVD rom or DVD player..so Maybe your Burner doesn"t like the Brand of DVD"s you are useing..And the SVCD"s you burn in HD-Format will Not play on your DVD Player as the Data is Burned differently so the Hardware has to actually support disks burned as HD-Burn format Disks, But I hear some Companys are starting to issue Firmware updates for some DVD and CD Players to Support HD-Burn and I"m sure eventually ever CD will Be burned in this Format and all hardware will support it but probably not for a Couple of years...

The HD-Burn was a Bonus here. At this time only OptoRite and Sanyo DVD players can read HD-Burn Discs, I was told. Soon some hacks are sure to show up for the Apexs as such. This dual recorder is firmware updatable, as I'm told.

At this time, I'm using Sony and Fuji DVD-RWs to check the drive and both are not being recognized. The Discs are about $4 each, just using the RWs to check the drive out. May be I may have a bad drive. Just giving it a good college try. I'm calling the dealer tomorrow and ask for some help in replacing the drive.

I bought the drive for $181 including shiping, which is not bad. The question is, will it work? Burn Proof was a technology Sanyo developed, and most of the drives use it now. I hope that many will jump on the Sany developed HD-Burn Technology soon.

Time will tell, but my personal feeling is that DVD burners and media will soon be so cheap that no one will care about the HD burn capability. I feel that trying to squeeze more out of CD-R is a lost cause, kind of like saying that someone found a way to make a floppy diskette hold twice as much data would no big deal when most of us can at least burn CD-Rs. As Lusifer said, compatibility is likely to be low and I wouldn't bet on a firmware update being made for Apex to support this. The hackers made some relatively minor firmware updates for things like miniDVD compatibility, but this kind of support is a major change and it may be too much to ask for from the firmware hacker community.