# What is the best DVD Burner for FreeBSD?



## itslikethat (Nov 19, 2010)

I have had mixed results in the past with IDE DVD/CD burners and their ability to be recognized by various windows systems.  I am about to purchase a new or used IDE CD/DVD Burner to use with FFMpeg and Mencoder, and I was wondering what is the best IDE/CD Burner to get that will have NO MAJOR ISSUES getting the drivers hooked up for FreeBSD.  Alot of problems with FreeBSD are hardware related, so what is the most recommended CD ROM device for FreeBSD?


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## danbi (Nov 19, 2010)

For a long time, I have not seen major issues with hooking up DVD burners to FreeBSD. Say, 10 years ago it was tricky. Modern drives have already standards compliant interface so connecting the drive will be painless. There is the issue with using it, which FreeBSD does not actually do for writing -- it is all dependent on the application you use for writing and DVD burners are different.

I have had good experience with Plextor drives in the past. My last one however just died of too much use, it could no longer write to any media. Until then, as a colleague of mine would say "it will write properly even to a brick!". At that time, I was very vary to buy any new drive, as Plextor did not have good new model, but.. eventually just went to the shop and purchased what they had there --- some cheap ASUS drive. To my surprise, no issues whatever (except it always says it's cable is not 80 pin )
I have also had strange issues with one SONY drive in the past. While it would happily write the media, reading it would almost always produce errors. The media was fine, just the drive was reading bad data -- other drives would read that same disk ok. So make sure you test your new drive in different usage scenarios before trusting it with your data.

Make sure you get a new drive, not used one because all DVD writers have (very) limited lifespan of the writing laser -- if you need to write lots of disks, prepare to replace the drive from time to time.


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## roddierod (Nov 19, 2010)

I've used multiple Plextor drives without any problem for years. Recently the Plextor quality has been falling,IMO, so I've given other brands a shot.

I had a Sony that had no problem with FreeBSD, but it died after a month or two. I now have a LiteON SATA DVD burner, if I use growisofs from the CLI to make DVD I have no problem. If I use k3b, I have to set the speed to 4 otherwise it errors...not sure why but obviously a problem with k3b.


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## itslikethat (Nov 22, 2010)

Yeah I ended up getting another LG 2010 version and it was recognized automatically by FreeBSD.  I am running KDE though, and I had to make a few changes to get it to autodetect DVDs when I play them.  I used a tutorial here and it did the trick.
http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=362


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## jem (Nov 22, 2010)

DVD burners comply to some kind of ATAPI standard as far as I know.  There is no reason why one drive should work while another won't be supported or recognised.

Of course, there still may be issues with a poor quality cheap drive being problematic, but generally speaking, all drives should work with FreeBSD.


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