DVD Duplicator

Got one of these in and the customer seems hot to trot. It is onlty a singl e copy device so the bill can't really be big. Might be worh a couple hundr ed at best.

it must have worked because the burner drawer is not closing, and the eject button is out of the read drive. Figgure we will just change both drives a nd be done with it. The two of them might be fifty bucks total and I'llk be done in ten minutes.

However, DVD ROMs that do not burn, well on like the Bestbuy site they are a bit hard to find. there is one down the street so I figure instead of fuc king wiht shipping and all that, just go there. I nbeed a read drive and a write drive and I need black fronts to match.

So I see a burner on there for $16. I mean, I won't put something in a box for $16. So can I just use two burners in the thing ?

It only has one little board on the bottom where the SATA cables connect, a nd a power supply and fan, and that's it.

There is absolutely no brand name or model num,ber on it and I can't find a n FCC ID, even though I was pretty sure those things were a thing of the pa st I still looked.

Another question is, this isn't one of those deals where I have to get the drive from them is it ? (whoever they are) If they are using standard drive s, maybe there is no hardware detection and it set to the OEM drives ?

Please advise. I just saw the $16 drives on the website, they might be out of them locally. I might have as much as $60 into them and do not want to w aste money.

Another thing is it has audio outpout jacks. (not video) You (not you) mean to tell me that someone will take their DVD duplicator and listen to a CD on it ? I put CDROMs in PCs so people do not have to wear out their burner for reading, plus copying is alot smoother.

This thing, there is only a power button, no other controls. I assume that when you put in a DVD and a blank it just starts.

Also, if these things respect copyguard the job could get blown off. If the guy wants to copy protected material and it won't do it we would rather no t ha ve the animousity that could bring. maybe I should talk to him. but wh en I do that I would like to lknow about this deal. CanI just use two burne rs in there or will something screw that up ? Computers, ;well sometimes I have told people "We are doing that becvause I do not know" meaning that I am dong what I KNOW will work rather than what I merely think will work. I ain't got all day.

Absolutely no model or brand on the thing. If you need, I could look at the board and see the chip number or whatever. What's more, the power supply h as one old style connector on it. However no IDE at all. Could this be a st ripped down PC power supply ? I don't see an ATX connector on it but wires can be cut.

That reminds me I have a PC PS to fix so I got a better PC at work. I order ed caps for its PS and they turned up too big. I did get the guy into Digik ey though so now I can fix that.

If, IF there is a reason that replacement drive might niot work then I will o=look into the prospect of fixing the ones in there.

How the hell do you break the eject button ? I know how. By being an asshol e and pushing the button before the disk is done burning and finalizing har der and harder because they are the same type of people who put 25 amp fuse s in where a 6 came out. Just had that happen with a guitar amp. I guess th ere are assholes in this business as well.

Anyway, I want to know if there are any hitches involved with just throwing in regular DVD drives in there.

Thanks in advance.

Reply to
jurb6006
Loading thread data ...

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

If you've got any spare used drives handy, its probably best to try it to avoid unpleasant surprises before quoting the job.

Replacement drives may need to have region free firmware or it will bounce when they unknowingly lock the region by copying imports.

--
Ian Malcolm.   London, ENGLAND.  (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)  
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Ian Malcolm

Oh shit, that's right. Thanks for telling me. that changes the whole game. If they have to be region free then thsat is only ot make copies all over t he world ?

And what if both drives at region one ? That should work right ?

I think I better talk to the customer in this. If he is bringing in DVDs fr om England or some shit I can see how......

Wait a minute, doesn't the regiopn only affect thge playback not the data ? Imena like a PAL disk will not play on an NTSC machine or wsomething ?

But then even PC DVDs had regions. I HAD one on which the region was never set and I made a point not to. You oculd only set it five times IIRC. The s oftware it came with reqwuired you to set it. I refused and used it as a DV D ROM,l nd whatever. I do not know what happened to it actually. It might b e around here somewhere.

I gotta talk to the dude I guess. If he is not dealing wiht international D VDs, most likely two drives set to region one willl work fine, unless there ar ehardware issuies. thatis wha tI was asking. Bt actuyally nex tI work I might just trer into that hting again and see if it is maybe region free. Look up the model numbers and all that.

Tell you this much, the customer did not set the region. ;this thing only h as a power button and an eject button on each drive. not much to it at all.

Reply to
jurb6006

If this is intended to copy DVD videos, there's a problem. All DVD mechanisms read all tracks, but recording mechanisms never RECORD the DVD-video leadin/region code tracks. For that, you need a special mechanism, and/or special blank disks. Without some special hardware, a DVD duplicator only copies data DVDs.

I'm not certain that a read mechanism reports the video leadin information, it might sequester/digest that internally.

You might just be better off putting a new belt into the 'not closing' drawer mechanism.

Reply to
whit3rd

Didn't I see somewhere that Wallmart branded DVD players are not regionalized?

Not that I've actually checked out this story...

John :-#)#

--
(Please post followups or tech inquiries to the newsgroup) 
John's  Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
John Robertson

Chances are any drive will work.

DVD regions are not an issue because they are not PLAYING the discs, just copying data, and a duplicator cannot decrypt a commercially pressed DVD video disc or deal with copy protection anyway. The only video discs they're made for are those you burn yourself.

The potential gotcha's are:

- DVD drives typically have riplock which limits the read speed on video discs, etc. When a duplicator dealer assembles a duplicator unit, the reader drive usually has custom firmware that eliminates any manufacturer imposed reading speed limits.

- The firmware on the duplicator controller board is tpyically written to "support" a variety of common DVD drives AT THE TIME OF MANUFACTURE. If you use "non-supported" drive(s) they're usually pretty permissive but you may have speed or other subtle compatability issues.

Reply to
Mike S.

The version I heard a few years ago was that the inexpensive ($40) Chinese DVD players sold at Wal-Mart would initially only play Region 1 discs, but could be "unlocked" just by entering a code on the remote. I don't think this was the deal where you can only change it 3 or 5 times before it locks forever; once you entered the code it would play any disc.

The modifications for most other DVD players at that time involved burning a special CD-R with a possibly third-party firmware update, using something like a JTAG programmer to reflash the microcontroller, or unsoldering the microcontroller to either program it externally or replace it with a different one. From a user's point of view, being able to do it from the remote was a good feature.

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds

I don't know about the details, but it did seem like some of the low end players were coveted precisely because they could be changed in this way.

That, and some low end players used standard computer DVD drives, so if th drive went bad, one could very cheaply get it going again.

I can't say I've seen any of those (the ones I've opened up have most or all of the electronics on the main board), but my DVD recorder, I forget the brand, that I found in a recycling bin certainly uses a standard IDE cable. The thing is kind of flakey, I did try a computer DVD writer with no good results, but then that made me assume I need to deal with the power supply, it may be flakey so the drive is contankerous.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

The Apex AD-600A could be made region-free with a specific key sequence from the remote contgrol. The Apex AD-1500 needed a file loaded from a CD-ROM. I also got a Coby from Walgreens for about $20 that could be programmed easily with the remote.

Reply to
jfeng

A little off-topic regarding to duplication, but with the price of DVD-players, there is little gained for the content suppliers by using region codes.

main DVD-player could only play region X, I'd just buy another to play region Y.

Leif

--
Je suis Charlie
Reply to
Leif Neland

The only problem with that plan is the output format. There's something I d on't know. Is HDMI universal ? In the old days you would get NTSC from a re gion 1 - the US. I think alot of Europe is region 2 which would be PAL I be lieve. Even the plugs would be different, in the US you would have composit e fromn and RCA jack, in Europe it might be SCART. I have no idea about re gion 3. Perhaps the middle east. Not sure about China etc.

Th DVD itself has no format I beieve. It's just a few bytes at the beginnin g or whatever that disables certain DVD players. I can imagine the reasons for this are something we do not appreciate. One aspect might be royalties. this would allow them to gouge Americans rates for this material Europeans would refuse to pay. Another thing is politics, there could be different v ersions of movies for diferent cunrties.

The old diffrerence in format were cuaed by technology period, and is why N TSC is among the crappiest formats. I think only Russia's old system was wo rse, 330 lines or something like that. Both PAL and SECAM are superior to N TSC, but then they came out a bit later. I know PAL will not work well with out a COMB filter and those used to be expensive. You didn't see them in NT SC sets until about the 1980s. They werre in VCRs though, but I don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg here. Was the COMB filter invente d for the crosstalk reduction in VCRs or to improve the TV set itself ? I b et even wiki doesn't know that one.

Anyway, alot of our digital tuners won't work in Earope either. they use a different channel spacing for both AM and FM. I regular analog tuner would work, but their deemphasis is 50 uS rather than 75 in the US, and they use less overall modulation. they had to do that because fof the sidebands bein g closer together. I think at one tome they even had a slightly different p hone preamp ?EQ curve. There used to be preamps with a selector "RIAA, EUR" some of them also had "WORN".

All of this is strictly because of slightly different decisions made about the technology. The DVD regions have no such excuse.

Reply to
jurb6006

=20

=20

gion=20

my main=20

Y.

You don't even need to buy them anymore. I have four or five I've found=20 in the garbage, and they all worked fine, at least for the brief time I=20 actually tried them.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

That's the commonest approach to region-locking - the disc simply has only one bit set in the region flag part of the data. A conforming DVD player is supposed to check the flags and only play content which matches its own region identifier.

There's a more complex approach which is possible... "RCE". A DVD can contain different programs, each of which is flagged for a specific region. A disc might contain a set of recordings flagged as "playable in region 1" and a different set flagged "playable in regions 2 through 6". A "Region free" DVD player might play the wrong one... and the "region 2 through 6" version would simply be a loop saying "You're in the wrong part of the world to play this disc." This approach isn't used very much these days, it sez on Wikipedia.

That's a big part of it.

Controlling release dates is another (related) one. They might want to release a movie in the U.S. first (at premium prices), and then release overseas in smaller countries later (at lower prices, more acceptable in those markets).

Reply to
Dave Platt

My experience is that the big name brands (Sony, Panasonic, etc.) generally are single-region players that cannot be made region-free. The cheap no-n ame brands that are sold by places like CVS or Walgreens are also single-re gion as they come out of the box, but they can often be made region-free wi thout much difficulty (just do a Google search). So there usually is no c ost penalty. Once converted, I have had no problems playing the signle-reg ion DVDs I have gotten from Europe, Asia, and North America (this works fin e on both my old analog TVs with RCA jacks and the modern flat-screen TVs w ith HDMI inputs).

Reply to
jfeng

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.