[vox-tech] DVD playback and burning under Debian; IDE DVD+/-RW drive

[Bill Kendrick]

I was at Fry's the other day, looking to FINALLY buy a CD burner.
I happened to run into a LUGOD attendee (Steve, who I vaguely recognized,
but sadly barely remembered - sorry, Steve!), who recommended a DVD burner
they were having a mail-in rebate deal for.

So, I decided that 4.7GB is, indeed, much greater than 800MB, so I went with
it!  It's a Sony DRU-510A "DVD +/- RW / +/- R / CD" ATAPI/EIDE drive,
which sports the following capabilities and corresponding R/W speeds:

  DVD+RW   (4x)
  DVD-RW   (2x)
  DVD+R    (4x)
  DVD-R    (4x)
  DVD-ROM (12x)
  CD-RW   (16x)
  CD-R    (24x)
  CD-ROM  (32x)

Aside from that fact that I have NO IDEA what "DVD+RW" is, compared to
"DVD-RW", it seems neato-nifty-keen...


My problem is, I don't know the first thing about this kind of stuff.
Once upon a time, I had an IDE CDR drive installed, and Mike Simons and
I tried to get it working.  Never seemed to succeed in burning anything,
and then eventually failed even as a CDROM drive, so I decided it probably
wasn't Mike and I being stupid, and probably just the drive slowing dying.


I've played a little with the CD capabilities of the drive, and have just
burned my VERY FIRST CD!!!  (My recent TuxPaint ISO for the demo I had
at the Co-op back in October.)


I haven't the foggiest idea how to get it to play DVDs, and therefore
haven't even CONSIDERED buying any DVD-ROMs to try and burn. :^)

I Googled quit a bit, and sat through some irritating arguments about
devfs on the #debian IRC channel; most of the links I found had to do
with DVD drives on laptops.  (We also have a Thinkpad T-20 with a DVD
drive, and it works fine; MPlayer's great!)

Folks on IRC suggested apt-get install'ing a packaged called "discover."
All it seems to do is point out the fact that I've got a 'tulip'-based
network card, and then chocks while trying to load the 'usb-uhci' kernel
module.  *shrug*


Noone here happens to have experience with DVD reading and writing using
an IDE drive under 2.4.18 Kernel in Debian Woody...??? :^) :^)


Happy that I can burn, and willing to wait until an Installfest in early 2004
before worrying too much about DVD/DVD-ROM,

-bill!