LIGHTNING UK!

If that's the case, I think this drive must use the Panasonic chipset rather than the Philips one that the 1620/40/50/55 do. I guess that means it might be missing some of the normal BenQ features for scanning and in the new 'Advanced Settings' window. Can you confirm this?

dirio49, Ok that would fall in line with the old 3.47 version needing a 1GB file to go into DVD mode then. I guess it hasn't been changed after all Qyngali, I've tweaked it yet again but it's very hard to try and remove rogue values created by the drive caching data....especially when (for me anyway) it's very difficult to make them appear.

That's because it is Sony hasn't made its own drives for ages now. They're either BenQ or LiteOn now mainly.

According to the logs you posted, the MDS one is being seen as a CDROM. and the ISO as a DVDROM I can only go on the information given

It's really odd actualy, DT 3.47 always needed an image to be 1GB in size before it went into DVD mode. Perhaps in the newer one (which I assume you're using?), that's no longer the case. As you can see from the logs, on one occassion it thinks the media is CDROM (the MDS one) and the other DVDROM (the ISO one). As CD and DVD have different transfer rates for 1x, that's why you're seeing different 'x' ratings within ImgBurn.

One was probably a CD image.

This the luck factor kicking in. Of course luck could be working in either direction so maybe you were unlucky on the ones that failed rather than the other way around as I mentioned earlier. Do check the state of the burning surface before you stick the discs in the tray too. Often they have dirt / dust on them and that would cause the burn to fail. Your drive would only ever burn at 4x max as that's all it can handle. Physically setting the write speed to 4x shouldn't make any difference.

You've got quite a chunk of weird stuff going on there, rather than just a spike as one would tend to expect. Anyway, the graph shows exact figures with no manipulation going on, we were talking about the value in the log which is captured differently and is averaged ever so slightly. The log value is also the one that I tweaked.

Don't forget that as soon as the disc has finished burning, the 'file handle' is closed and then Windows releases the memory. It's not lost forever

No, there is no timeout logic - also, what limit do you put on these things? a 1x burn could take an hour. Most people would have given up by then. It's pretty pointless anyway as even if ImgBurn closes nicely, the drive still won't respond until you reboot. Drives don't really like stopping mid burn. If you don't issue the correct sequence of commands, you get a 'Command Sequence Error' error! lol Also, you can put the drive in a state where it won't respond to command, in which case you have to reboot - no two ways about it. As such, I made it so ImgBurn still performed the normal functions it would do if it were a successful burn. ('Normal functions' are basically just 'Sync Cache' and then one or more of the 'Close Track / Session / Disc' commands. That's it.) Because there are limits to how much you should burn to a DVD, most of the drives will automatically pad out what you've burnt if it's not up to the lower limit allowed. This is what can seem to take ages. Some drives are nice and provide a % complete value. Others do not.

No 2 discs are ever the same. You could be being lucky when it does burn, and unless you do a proper PIPO scan after you've burnt it, you have no real way of knowing how good the burn is. You could try putting the real LiteOn 852 firmware on the drive, that might be better than Sony's version.

Ok I couldn't find a problem with this so please let me know your thoughts after reading what I wrote earlier.

You could try some other media, MCC-003-00 is 8x rated and your drive only supports it at 4x. That leads me to believe it's just not 100% supported on your drive. Various reports on google etc tend to say the drive isn't very good in it's own right. Shame you're working with a laptop, desktop users have far more choice.

Either way, this is f all to do with ImgBurn and so doesn't belong here.

Just try burning another one. I very much doubt ImgBurn would fail 10 times out of 10 when Roxio works every single time. If it does, let me know and I'll try to see what's causing it.

The third one down is indeed an ISO image. Just like when you double click an ISO file and ImgBurn loads up, the 'Open' button is doing the same thing.

You're circumventing copy protection. That IS illegal I'm afraid. Fair use etc only applies if the manufacturers haven't added copy protection to stop you from copying it. All (well, 99%) of DVDs have copy protection on them. In any case, if you're getting an error during the burn, it's not due to what you're burning. The drive doesn't give a monkies about what's being written to the disc. If you're not willing to attempt another burn, load a disc in the drive and copy + paste the info from the window on the right in ImgBurn.

Yup, no reason for that not to work.

Yeah I could do a 'MRU' type thing for the log folder. As for appending, it is of course possible, but would eventually slow down the saving process due to the way the logs are handled. I'd basically have to load up the entire existing file into memory, add the new log lines onto the end of it and then save it back down to the hdd as a file. I really don't want to have to load up + resave a 100mb text file!

With DVD+R DL, it could be very different. The drive will tend to finish off burning what it needs to in order to make the disc 'compatible'. That could end up being a huge chunk of the disc. In any case, you need to understand that ImgBurn isn't hanging, your drive / the I/O subsystem is. If the drive never returns either an error or a success, the program continues waiting for one. As soon as it gets such a thing, it'll be fine once again.

I don't get a slowdown, some others may do. Up to you if you want to use 1.2.0.0 or not. It's not going to break anything.

It'll format the disc is it's not displaying 'Formatted: Yes' in the info window on the right. You only need to do it once, just do it!

Thanks for finding it Rippraff

If your firmware is already up-to-date, all you can do is buy better media, or at least some your drive likes a bit more.

Ah, if it's intel, that's pretty easy. Just get the chipset INF utility from: http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df...44&submit=Go%21 Get the top one and install that. For the IDE one, I'll need to know which exact chipset your motherboard uses. If you can get a screenshot of the Device Manager window with that system branch expaned, that would help There is a setting in ImgBurn that will tell you the current state of AutoInsert / Run / Play within your machine. It's on the 'I/O' tab in the settings. Ensure that's ticked. Then you can look at other autoplay settings via Microsoft's little 'Tweak UI' program. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloa...ppowertoys.mspx