I am having some issues with the internal (pioneer DVR-109) burner. So far I have tried three brands of DVD+R DL media. The first type (and I don't remember the brand) worked fine. Memorex DL media essentially stopped in the middle of iDVD burn. Another brand - which is officially certified for Macs - did the same thing.

This is the third drive in this computer. The previous two essentially died of mechanical causes (stuck tray, etc). The drive also is flaky burning regular DVDs, no matter if from iDVD or Toast. Is there a test I can perform to determine if it's the media or the drive? CDs are being burned just fine.

Thanks

Peter

Short answer: Verbatim DVD+R DL 8-X. Burn no faster than 4-X or
you'll see a blip upon changing layers.

Long answer: Join videohelp.com, select the DVD Writer tab, and
search on "109" to see a whole bunch of user experiences with
that drive and various media.

DVD burning (SL and DL) is new enough that media are a real issue.
The gold standard for SL is Taiyo Yuden (I am not making this up)
that you can't get at WallyWorld. And WallyWorld seems to get
the Verbatim DLs from the bottom of the barrel. Two coasters
from five I bought.

Meritline.com and newegg.com are two reliable vendors.

What a difference a drive makes because I've had terrible results with my two pioneer dual layer burners. I do a lot of movie ripping and burning. There was never a specific pattern of success or failures except I always kept my fingers crossed.

Just this weekend my mac tech guy installed this drive in a external firewire enclosure.

I just can't believe what a difference a drive makes. Rips and burns are such a breeze no matter which dual layer media I've tried. Each rip/burn 100% success. I am convinced that those Pioneer drives are craaaaaappppppp. I can hardly wait to trash both my internal pioneer dual layer drives.

In the new year I'm trashing my 2 internal pioneer DL burners and getting him to install these LG's.

Part of it has to do with the Apple firmware they install crippling the drive a bit. Search around and you should be able to find updated firmware. In the past Apple has put 8x burners in some laptops but crippled them to 4x (I would assume this is done to keep the power requirements down). Firmware update allowed full speed burning. Updating also makes the drive more compatible with different types of media. But be warned, should the firmware update fail, Apple may not warranty the repair.

I have the same drive didn't do the firmware update yet but have had no issues with Sony DVD-R 16x/1x media. 20 burns so far with no coasters.

It's kind off soothing to hear that I am not the only one having trouble with this drive.

This is the third drive installed by Apple. The first two worked fine, never a wasted DVD and went through a stack of blow-out Memorex DVD DLs with no problems. But both earlier drives eventually ended up dead with mechanical issues (stuck tray, etc).

Since they put this drive in I am having problems burning anything but CDRs.

Just talked to my local Apple dealer and since I have Apple Care they would put another one in - after they run some tests to determine it's the drive and not the wiring in the G5. Of course they want my computer for 10 days and that is just not possible (I do find it very unlikely that anything but the drive is bad).

After checking on the price of the GL drive I think I'll give that a try. Somehow if a product has such a high failure rate I'd rather spend some of my own money and get something that works.

Thanks

Peter

Out of curiosity:

In reply to:

---

I just can't believe what a difference a drive makes. Rips and burns are such a breeze no matter which dual layer media I've tried. Each rip/burn 100% success. I am convinced that those Pioneer drives are craaaaaappppppp. I can hardly wait to trash both my internal pioneer dual layer drives.

In the new year I'm trashing my 2 internal pioneer DL burners and getting him to install these LG's.

---

After fiddling around some more with the Pioneer 109 in my G5 I found an LG GSA H10L drive at Sam's Club. I had to order it from their website. It was $50.

It's a little shorter that the Pioneer. Be advised though, in my G5 the plastic plate on the tray of the new drive was just a bit too high to fit through the slot on the computer. This plastic plate has all the logos on it and using a flat head screw driver you can carefully remove it. After that the drive fit perfectly, and boy, does it burn. I have yet to burn higher quantity. But the fact that it burned the DL discs that would come out as coasters in the Pioneer makes my day.

Thanks for that suggestion!

Well I now have 3 LG burners that I noted in my earlier posting and a fourth one on order.

Just the other day I brought home from our public library including some DVD's I purchased more then a dozen DVD movies of music group live stage stuff ( e.g. Neil Young's Heart of Gold ). I strictly used my "firewired" LG as an endurance test and first it ripped and then immediately burned a copy using DVDRemaster of each movie. It took a few hours and not one coaster.

How come LG can build a burner that works and yet Apple and Pioneer build garbage? Talk about land fill. That's were my Apple and Pioneer burners are right now.

Sorry for the rant folks.

Darn.... After installing that new burner iDVD won't let me burn DL discs or encode DL images anymore. Have searched the forums and installed Patchburn(?) - even though it shouldn't be necessary. I have reset PRAM, deleted iDVD preferences, repaired permissions.

Toast 7 recognizes the DL drive but for some reason iDVD doesn't - although for creating a disk image it shouldn't matter.

Alright. After lots of searching I found a patch here:
http://www.hardmac.com/news/2005-05-26/#4090

It enables iDVD 5.01 to use third party DVD burners. After following all instructions on the webpage iDVD was once again able to write to DL discs and create disc images.

I have had Macs since many years but that drove me up the wall like no issue I had before. I had nothing but trouble with the three Pioneer drives that were put into my G5 and died there. I spend close to $100 in DVD/DVD DL media turned toasters. I pissed off several Staples employees and got mad at my web CD source. Then I put that LG drive in. It works flawlessly with any and all media I have laying around - but Apple had to cripple iDVD for whatever reason.