Before continue reading today’s article, I’d like to warn you that this is for advanced users and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you CAN damage your DVD drive and will void your warranty. Did you know that it is possible to edit the read and write speed for a certain DVD writers? I didn’t know that it was possible until today.
I found a tool called Media Code Speed Edit (MCSE) which is able to make your DVD writer read and writer faster. For some DVD writers, the read speed can be increased up to 50%-100% with riplock patch. If you have LiteOn, Benq, PHILIPS, HP, LG, NEC, newer PIONEER, Cyberhome, Gigabyte, Samsung and Artec DVD writers, you have a good chance to play with MCSE and speed up your drive.
MediaCodeSpeedEdit allows you to change the write speed for your media and to add new media codes to your firmware by renaming an already available media code. The new media code name can be entered manually or can be imported from the DVD Identifier media code output to be sure that no special characters are lost. This kind of media code renaming will remove the original media code name from the patched firmware, so it is no longer supported by the firmware.
Real adding of additional media code names would mean to shift and extend all internal media code tables or patching all media code scanner for all supported firmwares, which would be a quite complex task. So don’t do it if you don’t know what you’re doing.
MCSE basically hack or edit the firmware for your DVD writer and then you flash the hacked firmware to update your DVD writer to support faster read or write speed. If you don’t know where to get your DVD writer’s firmware, you can search in Google or head to Media Code Speed Edit forum to get help. The below steps would give you an idea how MCSE works.
1. Download the firmware you want to modify 2. Start MCSE 3. Load the firmware file by clicking the load button 4. To increase the read speed, simply click the increase read speed checkbox. A greyed out checkbox means this feature is not available for your firmware 5. To increase the write speed, double click the media code you want to change and select the write strategy you want to use instead. This is a bit of trial and error 6. To teach the firmware a new media code name, select an unused media code of the same media type from the list, e.g. a -R media name if your new disk is a -R media, and rename it by modifying the Media Name/Ext/Rev fields on the right. Instead of manually renaming, you can also import the media name by clicking the import button and following the displayed instructions. Click the set button when done. The original media code will not be supported by the firmware anymore 7. With some firmwares you can directly modify the write speeds using the write speed checkboxes and clicking the Set Speed button. Greyed out checkboxes mean this feature is not available 8. Save the firmware 9. Flash the modified firmware as usual 10. Reboot
If you want to buy a new DVD writer, it’s no longer necessary to pay more money to get a faster reading and writing speed. Just refer to the list of supported DVD writers, buy one of the cheap one and increase the read & write speed with MCSE! How geeky is that?
P/S: Using patched firmware might damage your drive and will void your warranty. The use of MediaCodeSpeedEdit is at your own risk. Although MCSE supports a lot of DVD writers, I did not have the chance to test this because both of my QSI and PIONEER DVR-108 DVD writers are not supported by MCSE. If it could, I’d have tested it as I have full faith in this program because it is constantly being updated since November 2004.