Hi Guys, especially Tim C and Karangguni.Happy New Year

I am very pleased with my 4163B and now a friend wants to upgrade to a DVD RAM drive. The new one is 4167B and my question is -- Will that driver, which you told me about and helped with simple instructions, dvdram 5.0.1.8. work with this new model, or is there another driver to enable formatting the RAM discs, UDF 1.5?

Also, I could ask, as I have read that lots of people seem to have awful problems with the new one, would it be better for my friend to try to get hold of a 4163B instead of the new one? There are still some available on the web.

Thank you again for all your help,

Cheers

Ruth

And a Happy New Year to you too!

5.0.18 will work fine with the 4167B. I have a 4167B and it runs fine with 5.0.18.

This is a bit of a puzzle right now. The 4167B seems to have two known problems :

1. Some people apparently just can't get the drive to read DVD discs of any kind. Some report it will not read DVD discs burned on other burners, but it has no problem reading discs it burned itself.

Others like me, don't have a problem with that at all. Last night I decided to test my drive and I chucked in about 20 or so different types of DVD+R/-R discs burned with other burners to see if I would run into a problem. For good measure I threw in a few burned CD-Rs and a pressed movie disc. My 4167B read everything without problems so I don't seem to have this problem.

The problem is that nobody knows what is causing this problem. One person who had this problem connected his drive to a friend's system and it worked properly. It seems to be some kind of combination with certain motherboards where the drive just won't work properly. Unfortunately, nobody knows which motherboards are the ones affected at the moment.

2. Audio discs burned with the 4167B have trouble playing on certain stand alone CD players. The symptoms are the first track will not play, but every subsequent track after that is fine.

I have not tested my drive to see if it exhibits these symptoms. I don't burn audio CDs much, so it isn't an issue with me.

It's a shame really, because the 4167B, with the latest firmware, has very nice burn quality.

The only drawback with the 4163B is that it lacks firmware support for certain 16x discs right now. LG's firmware department looks like it has gone on an extended holiday at the moment. Nobody has seen any firmware updates for any drives for about two months or so.

If you want to play it safe, go for the 4163B. Just make sure you get the GSA model NOT the GWA model. GWA models are OEM ones which have no firmware support from LG. Also, avoid Memorex 16x discs. Certain batches of those contain the discs which the 4163Bs firmware does not support.

Hi Ruth

Happy New Year to you too.

I can't really add to Karangguni's post.

Currently I'm using 16x Verbatims (+R & -R) & Taiyo Yuden T03 16x (in Plextor guise from SVP) which all burn nicely in the 4163B. I've just tried some new Ricoh 8X +RWs which are supported by my LG but not by the latest firmware in my Benq 1620. These seem to be a very nice RW media and burn at 8x.

I think if I wanted another drive right now & I could find a GSA-4163B then I'd go for that as karanggui points out there are some possible issues with the 4167.

is this the thread contaning the link for dvdram drivers 5.0.1.8? it says it is in the post below. i`am new to these dvd-ram disc & don`t want to stuff anything up in my so far flawless 4167

thanks ako

Yes, but you can also try 5.0.2.1 which I've used on both my 4163B and 4167B successfully :

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...1&postcount=14

i can`t download the driver from that link, but is it the same 1 as this

Sorry, incomplete links there. These should hopefully work :

Win2k : http://www.scambia.com/download.php?...y&size=3149875

WinXP :http://www.scambia.com/download.php?...y&size=2548478

No, they are not the same as those from Panasonic's website. Those need you to have a Panasonic writer to install. These have been hacked so you don't need a Panasonic writer.

sorted thanks alot

Thanks very much all of you. My friend has located and bought a 4163B on the web for £44, not bad I think. Just have to keep my fingers crossed that it works as well as mine.I think we'll stick to the driver that works with mine, rather than go for the newer one, especially as I don't seem to be able to get the links to work properly,and don't understand what you mean by 'have been hacked'. until the next time, bye,
Ruth