Help: Downgrading A03 firmware from 1.90

Clearly, i do not understand either why pioneer do not let us use the firmware we want. But, my reason to answer is to thanks you alexnoe to participate so efficiently to this forum. I am really impressed that you put on your own burner the firmware 1.9, only to find the answer of downgrading and help someone else. And succeed ! Great Job.

@klona, By reading this forum you can see that too many people make coaster after coaster. There are of course several reason for that: Bad Media, Bad Hardware, Bad Software... But if Pioneer with the new firmeware has removed from the media table all the crappy one that 90% did not work well, and has improved the burning of the branded one (TDKG02), I think it's reasonable to move forward and keep the latest firmware. Many people reported improvements after upgrading to the latest version. May be there were major issues with the previous firmware that prevented some media to play correctly (TDKG02??). According to Pioneer: New firmware features: Revision handling for writing high speed media DVD-R/RW Writability Improvement DVD-R/RW Playability Improvement CD-R/RW Writability Improvement CD-DA Playability Improvement What's the point to revert to the old firmware if you just want to burn Riteg G03 in x2 (and 50% make a coaster) or burn other cheap media that most of the time will not play back correctly :confused: So personnaly I would stick with the latest update. But I agree that Pioneer should give an official explanation :sly:

Pioneer are not the only ones who prevent installing older firmwares. For liteon drives, you must use a DOS flasher which directly writes some stuff into the registers of its chipset (pflash for older ones, mtkflash for newer ones). I don't like it if something, especially a drive which I have on my own, behaves differently from what I expect it to do... @thxof: That changelog is just a long version of what liteon says for every new firmware: "match more media" :) The only really good changelogs I've seen for cd writer firmwares are from plextor. @atreides: There has been someone here with KT133A who could not even burn successfully at 1x speed on Verbatim media with DMA switched off...

Well, the thing is, I DON'T have the Asus motherboard like Commander, I just have the exact same problem. I have an MSI KT333 I believe. I am using Optodiscs as my only media. Could it be a bad media problem, for my standalone to suddenly not accept most of them? If so, the Optodiscs must have baited & switched, because I formerly had 100% success with burning DVDs from them. On my last batch of Optodiscs, I was having problems burning DVDs that were IFOEdited. Directory structure and file structure was perfect, but only about 2 in 5 burned would work in my standalone (of the exact same folder). However, discs burned after using TMPGEnc/Maestro were burned with 100% success. On the batch before that, IFOEdited discs also worked nearly 100% from memory. I am simply trying to copy a few DVDs that I TMPGEnc'd/IFOEdited a few months ago, and suddenly it doesn't work 100% like it used to, now it is more like 0%. My standalone just won't take the new copies. I am going to try to burn a DVD I had prepared by TMPGEnc/Maestro, to see if that will work. If I simply can't get it to work, I will probably EBay off my A03 and try out the new Sony model when it comes out in a week or so here. I'll update you guys and maybe we can figure out what's going on. fubarduck

Yeah I agree with Alex. Before throwing away your A03 try the Ritek G03 DVD-R, no-one ever complained about it (with old and new firmware) -- except me sometimes :p . It burns great in 99% of the case and has an impressive compatibility with players... all that for 1$ piece !

Hey THXTOF, thanks a lot for the advice! If I am still having problems I will try out those Ritek's. fubarduck update: The TMPGEnc+Maestro disc I tried burning didn't work either, so this is definitely a media problem. Where is the best place to buy those Ritek G03's, THXTOF? Thanks!