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Stratus Fear · Apr 11, 2003, 04:45 PM

DVD+R has been out for months now, and through several point releases, Apple still hasn't added support to read them. The only way to read them is setting the DVD-ROM compatiblity bit, and my PC drive can't do that

Stupid NEC. It's not a lot of lines of code to fix it either, I looked at the source myself. Has anyone else been running into this yet?

tikki · Apr 11, 2003, 09:11 PM

Learned that lesson last night at the Mac User Group Meeting. Someone burnt some movie projects on a DVD+R from his PC and gave them to us, and we couldn't read them at all. ugh.

Eug · Apr 11, 2003, 09:19 PM

I may be mistaken, but AFAIK it's a hardware issue, not an OS one. Indeed, you can even burn +R discs on Macs already, if you have the right hardware. Toast with OS X works fine for this apparently.

Anyways, if you run Macs, generally it's not a good idea to use +R. Apple has little interest in +R, and don't make +R compatibility a requirement in their machines. Macs are built around -R after all. Thus it's a crap shoot whether or not your machine will support +R, unless you specifically add hardware that will support it.

Stratus Fear · 12:17 AM

Originally posted by Eug:
I may be mistaken, but AFAIK it's a hardware issue, not an OS one. Indeed, you can even burn +R discs on Macs already, if you have the right hardware. Toast with OS X works fine for this apparently.

Anyways, if you run Macs, generally it's not a good idea to use +R. Apple has little interest in +R, and don't make +R compatibility a requirement in their machines. Macs are built around -R after all. Thus it's a crap shoot whether or not your machine will support +R, unless you specifically add hardware that will support it.

The thing is, my hardware DOES support it, the Sony combo drive in my iBook can read them. It's definitely a software issue. OS 9 can read them fine, OS X can't. I looked around on some opensource forums, and checked out the source for the kext that handles DVD stuff in OS X, and support for reading +RW is coded, but not +R. I think whether or not Apple plans to support burning of +R/RW discs shouldn't really affect whether or not reading of it is supported...reading of it should be supported--they support reading DVD-RAM already, and that's used much less than DVD+R/RW.

Anyway, I don't mind if they don't officially support +R/RW burning -- I don't plan on getting a superdrive for my iBook since I already have the DVD burner on my PC. But reading them should be supported -- Apple would probably stand to lose more than gain by not supporting it (although not much, it's more of an annoyance really). After all, they definitely aren't going to turn people to -R/RW simply by saying they refuse to let the OS read +R. But in any case, +RW is already supported so I imagine +R will come eventually, hopefully with 10.3. I imagine it's just not a priority, regardless of how easy it is to code.

Edit: The +R discs that you can burn in Mac OS X are probably done by a Ricoh drive or something, these hold most of the market right now...those drives usually set the DVD-ROM compatiblity bit. OS X then doesn't see it as an unknown media type (+R).

Eug · Apr 12, 2003, 12:31 AM

Yeah, that might make sense re: compatibility bit. What drives do you have? Who makes the NEC mechanism? Would it be possible to use a bit-setter utility from a different source? (I know nothing about NEC drives.)

Anyways, I guess we can pretty much safely rule out the permissions problems with PC DVDs, since that issue was resolved with X.2.5.

The reason DVD-RAM is supported is because Apple used to use DVD-RAM drives. Some Apple machines currently still in use have DVD-RAM drives.

Stratus Fear · Apr 12, 2003, 01:01 AM

Originally posted by Eug:
Yeah, that might make sense re: compatibility bit. What drives do you have? Who makes the NEC mechanism? Would it be possible to use a bit-setter utility from a different source? (I know nothing about NEC drives.)

Anyways, I guess we can pretty much safely rule out the permissions problems with PC DVDs, since that issue was resolved with X.2.5.

The reason DVD-RAM is supported is because Apple used to use DVD-RAM drives. Some Apple machines currently still in use have DVD-RAM drives.

The NEC drives are firmware locked from setting the compatibility bits. I've even tried other programs that can set those, and they just spit out access errors. I have no idea what crack NEC was smoking when they decided to disable that, seeing as how it's one of DVD+R/RW's best features over -R/RW. The DVD-ROM in my iBook is the Sony CRX-800E combo drive. It can read pretty much everything I throw at it...at least in OS 9 where the OS seems to ignore what actual media type it is. I guess it just brands everything as DVD-ROM regardless. OS X on the other hand... I'm guessing the reason it can already read +RWs is because +RW drives were already out last year before Jaguar's release, but +R/RW drives only started out near the end of last year.

Maybe X.2.6 will fix the +R thing

And I'm a fairly recent Mac user (October actually). I didn't know that Apple's earlier machines used DVD-RAM, but seeing as how Apple is an early adopter of a lot of different technologies, I'm not really too surprised. But somebody's got to do it, right?