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F@ck! I've been trying to buy this drive for 3 months - it's been on back order (Sony DRU-500AX - it's the new 4X version of their DVD +/- RW drive).

A friend found it in California and shipped it to me. Damn thing's defective. Every file it reads (DVD, JPGs, EXEs, whatever) are corrupt. DVDs and JPGs are full of compression errors, apps won't load.

Now I've been on hold for half an hour with Sony tech support. What friggin' lame computer peripheral company in this day and age isn't setup for online RMAs? Sheesh....

are you sure you have the jumpers set right?

I had the same problem with an old Pioneer A-03 we bought for the company i worked for. Turns out it didnt like the 80pin ATA100 cable, switched to a 40pin and it was fine.

THough it doesnt sound like the same error I dont think, for me I could put in a cd/dvd and see the contents, but everytime I tried to install something, Windows Installer, or WISE, etc, would tell me the file was corrupt.

Okay it's NOT the drive. Seems like it's an issue with this workstation. The drive works fine on my P3-1000 LAN party rig.

Spent an irritating hour talking to a tech support weenie who knows less about computers than my grandmother.

Asshole pissed me off. When I told him that I had not installed the software that came with the drive, and that I was getting obvious data errors since I could see compression errors in JPG files I was browsing off a CD-R disc, he kept insisting that his manager said that there's no way I should be able to read anything off the drive until I installed the software.

I calmly tried to explain that you didn't have to install ANYTHING to use the drive as a regular CD-Rom. Then he asked me what software I was using to view the images. I said I was using the native viewer in WinXP. Then he said he couldn't give me any support if I used a 3rd party viewer app and that I have to install their software :fight

ANYWAY, one intelligent thing he recommended was to try it on another system since I was an IT tech and sure enough it worked fine on my LAN party rig.

JUDG3: You may be right - it's on an ATA100 cable and I've seen something like that before. it would be a problem though since there's a removable ATA100 drive on that ribbon as well that I use for video editing.

Might also be my IDE drivers. I just realized that when I upgraded this rig to XP I never installed the IWill XP333 mobo IDE drivers - XP used it's own drivers. I'm going to Ghost the XP partition and try installing the latest drives.

Okay, I made sure I had the latest IDE driver (looks like I already had it installed but installed it again - the IDE driver in the integrated 1.07 drivers).

I also changed to a standard IDE ribbon instead of an ATA100 ribbon.

Still have the same problem.

Need some ideas. Only thing I can think of is to install an IDE controller card for the burner, and I hate to tie up another IRQ if I don't have to.

This is what a JPG image looks like read off the drive (they all have this banding effect):

jump back a few driver version FP i think i have them saved if you need them. I had problems with the IDe drivers from Ali it made all the drives look like SCSI and would cause problems with Nero only way i got my drives to work was use an older version that made everything look like IDE which it should have been. Might try the latest drivers Ali has. Last version i have is 1.091.

All I have are 1.06 and 1.07 Integrated drivers. I tried the 1.06 and it didn't help

ALi website just has the 1.07 posted.

Unless you can think of anything else Preding to put this DVD-RW in my LAN party system for now so I can at least use it, and order a Promise Ultra133TX2 controller card from NewEgg and HOPE that connecting the drive to that will solve the problem on this system.

The bummer is that I have a Promise FastTrak66 controller out in the garage, but Promise never released XP drivers for it.

have you tried putting it in anyways i bet XP will detect and install drivers for it. If you've ghosted its worth a shot anyways. here's a link ot the 1.091's from Ali [url]ftp://ftp.aliusa.com/driver/Integrated1.091.exe[/url] I have these installed on my xp333 and they work fine with the old slow 8x4x32 burner on that machine. Wanna talk about a hell of a board. Its running a 1700+ Tbred at almost 2 gigs right now... Ali had a hell of a chipset with the Magik too bad it didnt' really take off...

I tried installing that card in an XP system once and no go. Pretty cheesy of Promise not to support it in my opinion.

Anyway, I have an ATA133 controller on the way (I can always use a spare if it turns out I don't need it).

I'll try those drivers. Thx.

Burner's working fine in my LAN party system - burned some DVD's last night.

Keep an eye on that drive, I think something funnies afoot!

I was interested in that Sony - and + r rw drive also, just holding back because of the price. BUt today I was looking around, and newegg is out of stock, so I went to SONY site to see where else I could get it and at what price. Geuss what, got a no longer available message!

Perhaps they are having lots of problems with it not working like your having and stopped selling it? Don't know, but find it fishey that a new product showed up not available, on the manufactorers site!!

As far as the graphics problems, windows does strange stuff!
Awhile back I had a problem my .jpg files in one or more programs were cut in half and changed sides! Left to right and right to left. A circle cut down the middle then swapped side to side, it looked like a butterfly!
Didn't flip the picture, just put the right side on the left side!

Those were on the hardive and cd's it was happening. Not doing it now though, but still have problems my filenames get caps when I want all lower case!

I run case change on them, but it's still the pits that I can't just save them the way I want them named to begin with!

Thanks again for the Chase Change help too! Been a life saver!

ANyway keep us updated if that's a good drive or a dud. If It's available and cheaper I may be buying one. If not, then I'll get a dedicated drive for either + or - just not sure which way to go on that.

So far the drive's working great. Burned several DVDs already, all on my LAN party system.

The drive itself is built very rugged, unlike most CD-Roms and Burners. It's heavy and solid. Very attractive too with a decorative polished aluminum trim plat on the front of the tray door.

Right now I've been using Ulead Video Studio (which I already own) to capture from DV or VHS and edit them on my workstation using Vegas Video, rendering them as DVD ready MPEG 2 files, then I just copy them on to the LAN party system's drive over the network to burn it on the new burner for now.

The included MyDVD software works great (I haven't installed anything else - most of the other software that came with the drive I'm not interested in and I already have Nero for CD-R's). Unlike what you get with some hardware, MyDVD 4.0 isn't a "light" version, but the full program which is nice.

Since the system it's in right now doesn't have a firewire card or video capture I can't test the direct-to-DVD function of MyDVD which is something I'm very interested in. You can supposedly just take a tape from a VCR or DV camcorder and directly burn it to DVD WITHOUT first capturing it to a file on the hard drive. Basically, the burner acts like a simple VCR. I have a ton of old VHS tapes I want to archive, so I'm really interested in this.

Sony's been having MAJOR problems cranking out enough of these dual mode drives since Xmas. The original DRU500A has been available but hard to find. The newer DRU500AX is almost impossible to find. A friend found some computer warehouse in california that had 2 and scarfed them up - one for him and one for me. If you're interested I can send you the info on them. I understand they had several A versions in stock as well.

The original DRU500A is a solid workhorse with a good reputation on the newsgroups. The only major difference between the A and AX is that the latter works with 4x media (the A's max speed is 2.5x on DVD burns). MyDVD doesn't tell you the speed it's using, but I suspect that it is using 4x because the burns have been VERY quick. I'm told that most DVD media sold today is made to 4X standards even if it doesn't say so.

I could have gotten the A version and just updated the firmware to get the same feature, but I held out for the AX since I understand there are some other subtle differences, and I would assume that AX would have any bugs worked out that cropped up on the A version (hopefully).

I think Sony just didn't expect there to be this much demand for it and doesn't have their production ramped up. Newegg has been claiming to have them on 1 week back order for 2 months now, and then dropped it. I think they realized they weren't going to get any soon, and people were probably calling up complaining.

I think the only other company that has a dual mode burner is Phillips, and I understand that it's hard to find as well.

BTW: I've been using nothing but DVD+ discs. The price on + and - is almost the same now, and a friend of mine has a + drive and he's found no major compatibility issues.

I just typed a a nice long message, then the net would not respond, so it got lost

So to some it up, yea, I want one too!

Been thinking about one of those soney + - drives, just holding off because of the price, then it kinda through me when the Sony site said no longer available! Otherwise I am looking for a good but cheap - rw I think.
I want compatibility with as many DVD players as possasbile. I think thats the - rw -r isn't it?

I am going to get back to work on a cartoon I started awhile back and never finished, so when I burn it to DVD I want it to work for everyone as much as posible!!

As for copying VHS tapes to DVD, have you hit the tapes with copy protection yet and if so what did you do to get around it? I've got some I can't even watch on the system, let alone capture because the protection causes the video to go bright and dim. More of a bad flicker than unuseable, but takes the enjoyment out of watching them so I don't bother! Not a problem for me so far with the DVD's, I know how to get rid of most of that garbage. But without a burner not a lot of point to doing it.

I bought 6 of the Snow White Platinum DVDS over a year ago, my kid still has not watched the one we opened! Damm copy protection plasters a still image over top the video so we can't even watch it after we paid for it!! Over $160 of unuseable DVD's of just that one movie!!
I am seriousily thinking about filing a lawsuit over this also!! Even if I don't win, it would cost them more than I paid for the movies just to appear in court!

Since we don't watch TV here, the one we have is about 1988! Works good as a new one and all we do with it is watch movies. Does not have the newfangled connecters, just the cable type. So the other day (Saturday) I broke down and bought a DVD player for the kid. Geuss what, yep could not use it! Did not have the cable style output and said on LARGE paper in LARGE type hidden inside the box, will not work connected to a VCR due to copy protection!! SO I returned it within 3 hours of buying it, then they asked if I wanted to buy the adapter for the TV? About $25, and they don't even have one instock! Wasn't gonna but it anyway though. But what then, connect the DVD player to the TV and throw away the VCR? or am I supposed to buy more stuff like switches, or break something consantly changing the cable from one device to the other??

So I geuss what I will be doing is breaking the protection on the DVD's so we can watch them on the computer. Then I can probably get a DVD player and connect it to my VCR and then to my TV. Then we can watch the non-protected disks on the TV! This is realy suposed to make me want to go out and buy MORE movies LEGALLY???

And they wonder why they don't sell more DVD"S and VHS movies!! Piracy has nothing to do with it, They are losing sales because peope like me won't pay $20 a movie when they won't let us watch the thing once we legaly bought it!!!
Do you think a major piracy company goes to this much trouble? Nope, they pop out a disk in a few minutes once and make a billion copies of that! It is us legal people that copy protection harrases, then we get fed up and freeley give away stuff for revenge!!!!

Anyway, I ordered a gimmick a week or so ago that is supposed to strip the protection from the video signal. I Probably got ripped, but if it works it's worth the money, about $35 I think it was. I saw various hardware for $200 that is supposed to do the same thing and has extras to adjust color and boost signal strength and such. I just bought the cheapy for now. It is supposed to work the same way as the more fancy units, so lets hope so

I'll let you know if it works if you want, if I ever get it. Comming from over sea somewhere, AU I think it was.

You cant really blame the DVD player manufacturers for trying to use a DVD player on 14 year old hardware. However, I agree with you in that Macrovision and whatever else hollywood may use to copy-protect DVD's STINKS! Btw, several DVD players (some cheap-o Apex models, apparently) have hidden menus that allow you to disable the copy-protection.

The stuff I need to archive is personal, not commercial VHS tapes.

There's nothing you can really do about copy protection on VHS tapes. it's not just a special signal (although that's part of it - it prevents modern recorders from properly recording copyrighted material).

But they also purposely record the video signal or vertical sync very weakly - far under normal specs - so that if you tried to copy it to a deck with copy protection disabled, or to a computer, the recordign would be poor due to loss of signal from 1 generation copying.

Those boxes that claim to correct this problem (image stabilizers), generally don't. They are nothing but amplifiers of one kind or another and you can't do much if there's not much signal to begin with.

The only thing that DOES work is a Timebase corrector, but that's a VERY expensive piece of hardware.

In my opinion, this is a ripoff because you're buying a "damaged" VHS tape. The signal's weak and if you have crankly VHS deck it looks like crap.

I'd rather buy a DVD - I couldn't care a rat's behind about copy protection on a DVD as long as it doesn't compromise the image quality. I have no intention or desire to copy a DVD.

Got the drive and it wouldnt read dvd, cd,cdrw etc. Finally used old cdr to load software and VIOLA, it works. Hope this helps.