CloneCD

We checked the capabilities of the drive under Clone-CD:

Above you can see, the drive has no support for RAW reading of any kind and can not write to CD-Rs.

For the Safedisk 2 read test we used the game Max Payne. The read times are:

I 02:57:01 Starting copy from MATSHITA DVD-RAM LF-D310 to H:\maxpayne.CCD
I 02:57:01 Read SubChannel Data from Data Tracks: Yes
I 02:57:01 Read SubChannel Data from Audio Tracks: Yes
I 02:57:01 Fast Error Skip: Yes
I 02:57:01 Don't report read errors: No
I 02:57:01 Intelligent Bad Sector Scanner: No
I 02:57:01 CD contains CD-Text: No
I 02:57:02 Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-358329)
W 02:57:02 Device MATSHITA DVD-RAM LF-D310 doesn't support reading of 96 bytes subchannel data (CD+G)!
W 02:57:03 If you don't expect read errors on this CD, disable "Fast Error Skip"!
W 02:57:03 Failed to read Sector 807

--- SNIP ---

I 03:07:58 Duration of operation: 00:10:57
I 03:07:58 Reading finished!

Impressive Safedisk 2 reading performance... 11 mins.

PSX2

We tried to make a backup of a Playstation 2 game; we found out why we were unsuccessful with our previous attempt with the A03... and this time we succeeded in copying and booting the backup on our JAP PSX2 machine.

We used Windows XP to make the backup of the Playstation 2 game because the size of the image was more than what FAT32 could handle. Note: FAT formats (FAT12, FAT16, FAT32) use a 32-bit value for the file size, this means a maximum file size of 4,294,967,294 bytes -- short of the 4.7GB needed for the imaging of a full DVD (XP and Windows 2000 use NTFS which uses a 64-bit value but only 44-bits are used for the file size).

Sonic DVDiT2.3 LE

Panasonic's Burner comes with Sonic's DVDiT 2.3 LE which is very much like the MyDVD that is bundled with Pioneers DVD writer, but better (more menu support). There were a few different versions of DVDiT which was confusing us, but visiting Sonic's web site cleared up some of the confusion (zooming in on the picture will clear it up):

DVDit is no different from Sonic's other authoring program MyDVD. We didn't like MyDVD and DVDit is no different. The program works using "themes", allowing you to manage different kinds of media, such as audio, images and video. We didn't like it because it was cumbersome and had confusing menus. It tries too hard to be too user friendly but ends up being restrictive and slow. If you want to create your own DVDs to share with friends I would recommend you look elsewhere for your authoring needs.

DVD Capabilities

REGIONS

Region Codes are part of the DVD standard. There is a region number within the components required for DVD-VIDEO playback. The region number defines the region of the DVD-ROM drive and its playback hardware/software.

The regions as defined by the DVD-Forum are:

1. USA & Canada
2. Europe, Japan, South Africa and the Middle East.
3. South East Asia
4. Australia and South America
5. Africa and Russia.
6. China

I downloaded the latest version of Drive Region Info to check the status of the region codes for this drive RPC-2 Drive. (RPC-2 devices allow you to change the drive's region a certain number of times.)

After running the included PowerDVD to view a region 1 DVD:

Page 4 - Last Updated: 11 November 2001