i recently flashed my 1620 with the mediacodespeed speedpatched cvt. my firmware was b7t9, then i used the b7t9RPC1 cvt in the flasher. after everything was successfully done, my read speeds increased like everyone said and the burner became region free. now if i wanted to upgrade to the b7u9 firmware, would i have to repeat the steps i mentioned above for the drive again to be region free and read at 16x. what i'm not sure is do i flash it with the legit exe (b7u9), then restart. then use mediacode speed again, use the flasher and choose the b7u9RPC1 cvt file. anybody can confirm me if this is correct.

also, i get pretty slow speeds when burning at 16x, 12x and 8x. when i burn at 8x, i get an average of 6.8. does this sound about right. a 16x 4gig burn took me over 9 minutes. i know it shouldn't take that long. i've read about disabling wopc, but i'm hesitant to do that. would this really make a difference or is it the quality of the media that determines whether you burn at optimum speed. i use nero and copy2dvd as my apps. i'm very pleased with the drive as a ripper right now, but the burns are disappointing me. any suggestions. thanks a bunch.

If you want the region free then you need to apply the speed patch to the B7U9RPC1 cvt then you flash it to the drive.

Your average of 6.8 sound close for an 8x burn as it take time for it to ramp up to the 8x selected burn speed. Your 16x burn is a little slow, you may want to check your Burst Rate using Nero CD-DVD Speed it should be around 23 m/sec. I have not used copydvd for application, you may want to try DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink they work well for me and are free.