This sticky thread is where you can post your suggestions and feedback for LiteOn and Sony - things like features you would like to see and problems you would like corrected.

CDFreaks works very closely with many of the drive manufacturers now. Reviewers feedback problems that they find during the reviews and quite often they are fixed before the review is finalized. This is just an extension of that, so that the manufacturers can see what problems users are experiencing and what features will sell more drives.

Some of the manufactures even read the forums but obviously, as we all well know, it’s a very time consuming task to read all of the threads. So the intention of this thread is to create a central point for all suggestions and feedback that the manufacturers can easily read.

This sticky thread is common to all the Optical Drive forums now and through our Review Coordinators and Reviewers I will ask if they can try to encourage the manufacturers to read these threads.

When you post in this thread, please follow the below rules. If your post fails to meet these rules it will be deleted without warning or notification!

1. No flaming, complaints and/or praises. Only serious feedback and suggestions.
2. When posting feedback and/or suggestions, be detailed. Comments like "improve the firmware" will not do.
3. No questions, use the main LiteOn/Sony forum for questions.
4. Again, no flaming! If you have a problem with your LiteOn/Sony drive, post in the LiteOn/Sony Forum. If you have a problem with someone's post, either report the post or contact me.

Rules may be added and/or changed later.

Thanks to G@M3FR3@K for the original format of this post.

a detailed changelog for the firmwares would be interesting.
the read bug in newer 1653s firmwares is stupid. come on liteon, reading worked better with earlier firmwares.

if some liteon-firmware-engeneer reads this: download omnipatcher, see how good it is, pay the codeguys for their work and start making better firmwares with their help.

since the 1673s the drives work ok without any patches. but it could be better.
lets wait for the next gen drives. maybe some issues will be corrected there.

Be honnest with your customers!!! what happened to BS42 ???

Maybe a little dumb, but I'd like very much that liteon will return to old led scheme: red for burning, green for reading, and yellow for buffer underrun.

I'm aware that a tricolor led it cost more than a simple green led, but I'm an aficionado.

Finalization problem with burning over 8x was only solved by CodeGuys firmware, 1673 crosspatched to 1693.

Relating to what bichonn said, be honest with your cutomers. My experience with my sony DRU-710A with BYX1 firmware was awful. Their tech support told me to do everything that common sense and this forum told me not to do--they said to turn *off* DMA, etc. They had me reinstall windows *twice*. They told me the burner would work well only with Sony branded media. And, in the end, the problem was just that the firmware was very bad. BYX4 is many times better and makes me happy with the drive. If they had just said "there are issues with the firmware, please be patient and wait a few months and our engineers will solve the issues", I would have had a lot of respect for them and I would have stuck it out. Instead, I spend about 8 hours on the phone--95% of it waiting from them to answer. I spend a few dozen hours of my time doing needless diagnostic tasks.

So, Sony, your customers are who keep you in business. Treat us with respect and be honest in your dealings with us. The drives are fine--once Codeguys gets done with them at least. Stop wasting your time and our time on fake tasks and let's spend it on productive things. How much more useful would it have been to take my information and use to to improve the firmware rather than run me around in little circles and frustrate me? I would gladly have sent you some media samples--burnt and unburnt--for you to pass along to your firmware staff. Take advantage of your users who are trying to help you make a better product.

Please increase the DVD read speeds of your drives. This is why you should do this:

- Everyone else is doing it. NEC DVD-writers rip +R and -R media at 16x, but the LiteOn does only 8x! BenQ drives can do dual-layer media at 12x, but LiteOn does only 8x! You need to do this in order to remain competitive.

- The only media that is 16x is single-layer DVD-ROM, which, to be honest, is not all that common (unless you live in Asia and where pirated movies are very wide-spread).

- This is not difficult for you to do! Just change a few numbers in the DVD read speed table. As the patched firmwares demonstrate, LiteOn drives are perfectly capable of reading much faster than what is officially supported, so why not let the drive do what it is capable of?

- The LiteOn SOHD-16P9S DVD-ROM can out-perform the AOpen 1648/AAP *if* the SOHD-16P9S uses a patched firmware. But because the AOpen can read DVDs quickly using an official firmware, it very easily and quickly became the most popular DVD-ROM. It wasn't until a patched firmware for the 16P9S became available that people started to recommend this drive to people. Think of all the sales that you have lost to the AOpen by preventing your drive from doing what it is perfectly capable of doing!

Better compatability with other brands of DVD-/+dl disks

When you say other brands, do you mean other than MKM001 and do you just mean RITEKD01 or have you experienced quality problems with other types? - because most drives don't burns RITEKD01 well.

Oh, and a huge pet peeve here: make your website better! Get rid of the pills, and most importantly, get rid of the VBScript download links; not everyone uses Internet Explorer.

some suggestion to SONY and LiteON!!

1) Increase the read speed of +/- media to 16x
2) Increase the read speed of DL to 12x
3) Increase the read speed of +/- DL to 12x
4) Over speeding some High quality media to 12x even 16x if possible!! Media like 8x TY are highly regard on BENQ burner as a quality 16x media due to the highly tweak Write strategy!!

5) Better document of the FW change log!! everytime LiteON IT release a new FW we don't know what part of the Bug or Performance is been Fix/Enhance

7) Promoting Kprobe as the Offical Tools for Quality Scanning and might be a new FW/new version of Kprobe to support 8x Quality Scaning!! and LiteON please don't be shy to do so becasue we love that features!!

8) Maybe a Better FW to make LiteON burner as a Better Quality Scaning ODD on the Market (PIE/PIF/Jitter)

thats all

Fix the CD writing quality of the 1673/1693s. Or release a firmware update that locks writing to 40x. They had no right to release this drive as a 48x writer... C2 errors are totally unacceptable. My 2-4year old (can't remember) 48247s writes to all kinds of CDs with far better quality scans. I just wrote a whole bunch of media with KS0A and 6 of the 8 discs had C2 errors in the last 20MB.

I know they are DVD-writers first and foremost, but I have a limited number of drive bays and I had a hard time justifying leaving the 48247 in my computer. I have no problem with the 1693 writing at 40x... but I know I'll forget from time to time and leave it on 48x and have to reburn. Just release a firmware update to kill 48x writing (or fix it on ALL media) and I'll be happy. I'm already thrilled with the DVD-R write quality. You'd think that a company who makes such awesome CD-RW drives (speed, quality, price) wouldn't have this problem...

-Evan-

1. Fixing the bug blocking spinning up to high speeds when using Exact Audio Copy's secure mode would be a long overdue but nice touch.

2. Adding better support for CDS200.5.0.151/5.00.160 protection scheme would be welcome (13 hours and clicks in the files last time I tried).

3. Adding above changes to every firmware would be nice, too.

What about that ol' good problem with CD-RW? I mean, when CD-RW written on LiteOn DVDRW drive cannot be read on most of other drives. It's a pain in the butt.

Lower the Jitter for most +R medias.

BS42!!!!!!!!

I go with geno....really would like the green and red LED scheme again

D

About their products, they are good to me
But seems that THIS forum is better than Customer Support line...
So Liteon, pay to Codeguys and others that made this great forum what it is today...

I had a SOHW 812s fw USOQ that stopped reading +RWs, it would write them but not read them, made me nuts, I replaced it with a 1693s, but after some reading I put it back in my computer and crossflashed to fw VSOJ. Joy it reads and writes +RWs fine now.

Just bought a Lite On 5104 - can at least record a half an hour show a day - if I set my t.v. manually to what channel I want the recorder to record - and have to make sure my t.v. is set on the PBS channel every morning - HOWEVER- - I went to erase some of the show - I do not want to finalize anything, at least so far - when I went to erase
it came out with a finalization warning - - won't my DVD-RW's automatically record over or what do I need to do - I got a invalid disc message last time - after recording one half hour???

I just inherited a 832S VS0J from a buddy during some help in a new system upgrade. I decided to subject it to my usual rigorous media tests and analysis, only to find it crashed on half of the media attempting to burn them. The affected media were Prodisc F01 (Fuji branded), Optodisc OR8 (Acro Circle), and Daxon AZ2 (BenQ branded). The Prodisc F01 failed with a "power on, reset or bus device reset occurred (062900)" and the other two simply failed to init with "No additional sense information". Not too impressive for some pretty common retail branded media that I have plenty of excellent results from discs from these same spindles.

I also found extremely bad PIE levels on Ritek R03 (Maxell branded). Sony branded Sony D11 didn't perform very nicely either so I will attach that result as well. MCC 002 (Msonic branded) burned with reasonable quality levels, but there was POF errors at the end of the disc so this appears to need some work too. I have seen the error spike where the POF's occurred on other drives with media from this spindle, but the other drives never produced POF errors.

I have owned 451S, 812S, and 1633S drives in the past but had stopped buying Liteon products for this exact reason. VS0J was a relatively recent firmware release so hopefully Liteon is still listening!

CMC E01 (TDK branded printable) and Prodisc R03 (Vakoss branded) burned fine so there is nothing wrong with the drive itself. As a caveat to that, the CMC E01 burn was the worst quality results in terms of PIE, PIF, and jitter values of the 19 Nero Test discs on different drive / firmware combos I have run. The Prodisc R03 wasn't my worst results ever, just the 2nd worst because I have one burned on an 812S US0Q.

I have a liteon 1633s and a 1693. The 1633 burn quality is pretty bad even with the newest bsos firmware. I only use it to do scanning. Until recently, I found out you can crossflashing 1633 to Sony DRU-710a with BYX5 firmware. So, I tried it. I was WOW with the burning quality with this now Sony DRU-710a. The most important improvement is Dual Layer. I always has a problem with burning DL disc that when I watching DL disc, then disc freeze a little when the disc changing to second layer. This happens with my Liteon 1693, even with my NEC 3500AG. I just burning a DL with this fake Sony, the freeze problem is gone. I am using the RiDATA 2.4x DL from newegg. The ID code is RICOHJPNDOO. I paid around 1.5 per disc which I think is not too bad. I have to before this Fake Sony, I mainly use NEC 3500, it has very good SL burning, but not DL. Anyway, my 1633(which now is Sony) is consider my best overall drive. Its SL burning is comparable to my NEC, but DL is the best among my 3 burner.

Well, I actually got a Daxon AZ2 to initialize a burn without failing and here is the ugly results--obviously support of this media needs work...

Both the 812S US0Q and 832S VS0J have problems with Optodisc OR8 media, but unfortunately I only have a screen capture of the 832S. I did get the 832S to init properly onto this media as well now, it seems the drive wouldn't function consistently on an ASUS P2B board, latest BIOS with a P3-600. The 812S results are even worse than these ones with triple the PIE rate, higher jitter, and about a 25% increase in the PIF rate. Quality score is 82 vs this posting of the 832S. My BenQ, Pioneer and LG drives burn this media with a PIE rate under 3 and usually a PIF rate under 0.05, jitter from below 8% to a max of around 10%. My PX-716A doesn't handle this media all that well either, but the quality score has never been below 92 until these Liteons. The results with a TS-H552U US06 were also under 10 for PIE rate, around 1 for PIF rate, jitter around 9% and qscore of 92.

Updated problem results with the new 832S VS0M firmware on the same two discs, PIF rates are worse and POF's are now occurring on the Ritek R03 media. > 5 million POF's on the BenQ media, yowsa....