DVD-ROM drives on the Amiga

[TjLaZer]

Just wanted to post my experience with this.  I have a stock A4000 040 that I upgraded to OS 3.9.  I actually have 3.0 ROMs but am able to Softkick to 3.1 and OS 3.9 works fine, even with the AmigaOS ROM Updates!  Anyway I had this Toshiba DVD-ROM drive (IDE) so I thought, what the hey, let me hook it up and see if it works.  I already had a NEC CDRW that was working with the Cache CDFS just fine.  I plugged the drive it and it read CDs fine.  Then I tried a DVD-R I had burned of some files and guess what?  It read the disc!  I also tried a DVD I made with over 3GB of WHDload games and it also worked!  Awesome!  I was not aware of built in DVD-ROM support in AmigaOS 3.9!   :banana:

[K7HTH]

That sounds awesome! Good for you, man. I hope to do the same thing for my A4000D, but I am still figuring out how to load CDROM drivers to WB3.1 so I can install OS3.9. And then there is this Kickflash issue...

[Effy]

Hold on a sec, you just said you can READ DVD´s without using AllegroCDFS

[whabang]

I think he did...
Fairly easy actually:
The file systems are not too different, so CacheCDFS probably sees it as an incredibly overburned CD.

[Will-i-am]

I'm very interested in burning video to a DVD writer...any chance this is possible? I have a Toaster 4000 with the latest SW on it and am just getting into the system. I suddenly realized that it makes a lot of sense to burn onto a DVD since the VHS recorders are kind of old school. I have 3.9 on the A4000s I own so reading DVDs is pretty exciting! What about burning them as well?

[magnetic]

WilliAm

Its not possile ATM to burn DVDs on on Amiga, they are not powerful enough AFAIK. Burning DVDs is pretty high end computing, there is alot involved.

What we recommend to our Toaster/Flyer customers is to get a Stand Alone DVD burner and just streatm video direct from the Toaster to the unit. If you have an SVideo expansion board even better! (BTW we have a nice YCP 100 Svideo adaptor card for toaster in stock! Gives your toaster svideo (y/c) ins and outs ! ;-) )

magnetic

www.magneticsystemsnyc.com

[TjLaZer]

Hold on a sec, you just said you can READ DVD´s without using AllegroCDFS

Yes!  I was amazed too.  It works, even on discs that were not finalized.  I could not even read the DVDs at work but they worked on the 4000.  Truly amazing.

[adolescent]

magnetic wrote:
WilliAm

Its not possile ATM to burn DVDs on on Amiga, they are not powerful enough AFAIK. Burning DVDs is pretty high end computing, there is alot involved.

Incorrect.

Edit:  Maybe I misunderstand your context.  It's possible to burn a DVD, but if you are refering to encoding a video for DVD then it's less possible (although I don't have experience in this so I can't comment whether it's possible or not).

[SWAUG]

DVD Writing was covered on the SWAUG pages a while back

http://www.swaug.org

[KennyR]

adolescent wrote:
Incorrect.

Edit: Maybe I misunderstand your context. It's possible to burn a DVD, but if you are refering to encoding a video for DVD then it's less possible (although I don't have experience in this so I can't comment whether it's possible or not).

The biggest issue is lack of UDMA, which is a killer. You may find that doing anything at all at the same time as burning will result in an expensive coaster. At best, you can expect huge burn times.

I still have memories of it taking over forty minutes to burn a CD on my Amiga/040 with standard IDE, and the computer was virtually frozen all through. It takes less than five on my PC or Pegasos, and everything is accessible. Wouldn't want to try burning a DVD on Amiga, except with SCSI or some form of IDE upgrade...

[drHirudo]

KennyR wrote:
The biggest issue is lack of UDMA, which is a killer. You may find that doing anything at all at the same time as burning will result in an expensive coaster. At best, you can expect huge burn times.

I still have memories of it taking over forty minutes to burn a CD on my Amiga/040 with standard IDE, and the computer was virtually frozen all through. It takes less than five on my PC or Pegasos, and everything is accessible. Wouldn't want to try burning a DVD on Amiga, except with SCSI or some form of IDE upgrade...

On my unexpanded Amiga4000/68040/25MHz/16MB FastRAM burning of 700MB CD on the Fly (not from ISO) takes 23 minutes and the Hard Disk is 5400 RPM, but I am using SFS. For burning DVDs with 4x you need 5,540 KB/second and at 2.4 x 3,324KB/s so this is not impossible speed for classic Amigas. The new writing devices (CD and DVDs) have the ability to wait and/or switch at slower writing speeds if the computer can't feed the data all the time - they are not like the old drives where if the buffer gets empty - the burning is canceled and the media is damaged. I think it's called Buffer Underrun Protection.

[tldaley]

magnetic wrote:
WilliAm

Its not possile ATM to burn DVDs on on Amiga, they are not powerful enough AFAIK. Burning DVDs is pretty high end computing, there is alot involved.

What we recommend to our Toaster/Flyer customers is to get a Stand Alone DVD burner and just streatm video direct from the Toaster to the unit. If you have an SVideo expansion board even better! (BTW we have a nice YCP 100 Svideo adaptor card for toaster in stock! Gives your toaster svideo (y/c) ins and outs ! ;-) )

magnetic

www.magneticsystemsnyc.com

Sorry, but I have an A1200T, Mediator, Voodoo5 5500, 040, 96meg ram, MSI Dual-layer DVD-+RW drive. I burn DVD-Rs and use DVD-RWs to backup my hard drive, other that minor teething problems these all burn find (able to be read on a WindowsXP box).

I use "Frying Pan" to do my burning.

Ciao, Trev Daley. :-D

Forgot to say that the system also has a "Power Flyer Gold".

[StormLord]

I have a SCSI disk on blizzardppc and a powerflyer.. syspeed tell me that I get 3.5MB from scsi disk and 4.5MB from PowerFlyer disk. The problem is that the DVD will be on the powerflyer and from as I remember the machine is almost freezed when the makecd writes to/from powerFlyer disks. With what program can I write DVDs and is there any trial version to test it ? The speed is not a problem if you have a scsi2 or a powerflyer but the CPU time IS!!
I have heard for an IDE2SCSI bridge and I have search acard for this but I'm not sure if this bridge works for DVD and CD drives, at acard website says thats fr disks.
If anyone knows something for any of this please post it!!

[Jose]

Hi there. Acard also have adapters for ATAPI devices. They allow you to use SCSI, so if you use that you won't lose much CPU time;) Check out the features of each card on their site, they specify if the card is more oriented twoards ATA HD's or ATAPI devices. Then go to eBay and buy the card there, they're cheaper, and from time to time some appear. There's a couple of them there right now.
Also, softwarewise, FryingPan is also very cool, haven't tried it (yet) but it's the best one for DVD burning on the Amiga from what I've heard, it even supports Blue Ray DVDs;).