[RLUG] CD/DVD Burner

[Scott Fritzinger]

>   I was going to recommend buying a Benq DW1640, but in the middle of
> writing this I checked to see where it could be purchased. It seems to
> be off the market now. I not long ago was looking for a new dvdrw drive
> and read many reviews, in the end I bought the Benq drive. It has some
> nice new technology that lets it make educated guesses on the writing
> strategy to use with a certain type of media. Unlike other drives that
> have to have the media in a predetermined list stored in the firmware.
> It looks like it has been replaced by the Benq DQ60, but the DQ60 is a
> completely different beast, and a bad one at that. Reading further I see
> it has improved with newer firmware, but still should be avoided. In the
> next month or so it looks like a DW1650 and DW1655 will come out to
> properly replace the DW1640.

[technical crap]
The DW1640, when paired with software that writes CUE/BIN images in 
DAO/96 (scrambled/raw) mode works very well, but this drive will not 
write Mode 2 tracks in either TAO or DAO/Cue modes at all. The firmware 
rejects write page for TAO recording and rejects the cue sheet even 
though Mode 2 TAO is required in the MMC specs. As a result, it can be a 
pain when writing VCD's or other single or mixed-mode discs with Mode 2 
tracks. For cdrdao, you must use generic-mmc-raw. I am not sure if 
cdrecord  can scramble the image and write in DAO/96 mode; someone else 
may know.
[/technical crap]

When writing ISOs, it is a REALLY nice drive :-) CUE/BIN and Mode-2 ISO 
images can be hit/miss in linux because of the Mode-2 problems.

-Scott