Pioneer 104 no longer writing readable DVDs

[BB67]

hi,
104 plus cheap spindle media. I wrote a dozen or so DVD's using Pinnacle Impression SE, that played fine on my NAD T550 set top player. However, after a 2 month period in which I didn't write any DVD's, all the DVD's I'm writing are not readable by any players (tried on two different PC's, and two different set top players including my one). I also tried writing some images (of the DVD's that were fine previously) using both Impression and the Instant DVD that came with the 104 with no luck.

All DVD's work fine on the 104 itself.

What did I do in between? well, I upgraded the firmware to 133 but that's about it. I haven't read of any similar issues occuring with 133.

Any suggestions on what the problem could be, or how I could track it down?

TIA,

BB

[seaegg]

Try burning an image from one of your DVD-Rs that are readable and use a different media like Verbatim and if it plays you know you got some bad apples in that spindle.

[BB67]

ok, since I tried 10 or more times to write in various ways and from different programs, I suspected it wasn' the media ( a run of 25 good ones, then 10 bad ones seemed unlikely!).

So I investigated the firmware. Apparently the 1.32 I upgraded to and the 1.33 I subsequently applied give problems with cheap media. They appear to be designed to stop customers using writing to cheap 2x media at 2x speed. No one else seemed to have had the issue with 1x media not working, but I thought it was worth a try.

The clever people at http://forum.firmware-flash.com/viewtopic.php?t=8463 managed to create a downgrade utility, which worked great. End result? Instantly the new images I burned work on my set-top unit.

SO I recommend not using the 1.32 or 1.33 firmwares on the 104.

hope this helps,

BB

[cfitz]

Thanks for sharing your solution, BB67.

cfitz