One of the major issues currently with the Pioneer 107 seems to be that although the drive supports 8x burning few media brands currently produce genuinely 8x media. There appears to be only one DVD+R 8x speed disc that will actually burn at 8x speed and that is by Verbatim.

There is a discussion forum on a Taiwanese site in Chinese that discusses some hacked firmware for the 107 that allows the writing to some German RITEKG04 8X DVD-R media.

It says there is a slight difference in the G04 4x & G04 8X media codes and the firmware has apparently been hacked to allow this media to write at 8x.

As far as I can gather this firmware was experimental and it might be leaked from a DVD-R manufacturer.

Ritek, Prodisc and Gigastorage are test-running their 8X DVD-R discs. Other manufacturers such as Princo and LeadData are still researching in the pre-write field because they don't have the 107 with 8X firmware.

The 8x writing differs from the expected in as much as the burner commences the burn at 6x speed up to about 650meg when it does a power calibration to see if the burn can continue at 8x speed if this fails then the burn aborts and you have a coaster. It would have been more practical if the calibration failed for the burn to continue at 6x speed rather than produce a coaster. Pioneer are the only ones that can give any reasoning with this argument.

I have examined this primitive hacked firmware and it does allow burning of 8X speed RITEKG04 media (which has a slightly different lead in code to the 4X speed G04) but with the way the OPC works it is quite easy to produce a 650meg coaster & I do not condone its use, but the fact that the firmware can be altered this way leads me to believe that it will not be long after Pioneer release the next version of the firmware that you will see an 8x for all firmware. This firmware when produced should enable burning to all media at 8x speed but BE WARNED not all media will burn successfully at 8x speed and you may find you produce a large number of coasters until you find the correct media.

The consolation is that if the burn fails at the 650meg barrier it was quick and you have not wasted much time.

My views on this is to wait until such time as fully patched firmware is released and leave this where it belongs in Taiwan.

Added:  Friday, February 13, 2004
Reviewer:  Flash

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