I just purchased an HP prebuilt tower and am just getting into backing up my movies. I use DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, and Nero7 Ultra. Should I upgrade my DVD drive or is the pre-installed one good? Just interested in the quality of the product I purchased (16x DVD(+/-)R/RW (+/-)R DL LightScribe drive). Thanks for the feed back in advance.
I have that drive, also. Iy really is a rebadged Hitachi/LG model GCA=4166b. No firmware upgrade is available. I'd rate the drive a B- .. however, all I use mine for is burning CDs and the LightScribe feature. I put my BenQ DW1640 in the PC for DVD burning work. You could have gotten a worse drive with your PC .. I've never heard of a really good drive coming with one ...
I have the HP DVD Writer 740b as well. Also in my computer I have an older HL-DT-ST GMA-4020B which burns only DVD-R and DVD-RAM. I can only burn DVD+R discs in the HP for some reason. When I use DVD-R discs in the HP drive the burn process begins and then has an error in the middle of the process. Sometimes it is close to finishing, sometimes a few seconds after starting. Both drives will correctly burn CDs and the old drive will still burn DVD-R. I've tried both drives as slaves and masters but nothing changes. I finally took the old HL-DT-ST drive out of the computer and the HP drive would finally burn DVD-R. Is there some setting I can change, because I'd really like to leave both drives in the computer? This is actually my second HP 740b drive because I returned the first one with the same problems. I've used different programs: Nero, Ulead Videostudio 8, Roxio with the same results. I've tried multiple brands of media as well.
I haven't tried -R discs with my HP and I probably won't ... I don't even burn +R discs with it as it really produces inferior burns to my other drives ... All I use it for is burning labels and sometimes burning CDs, which it does very well
