Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan

Great choice with the Pioneer DVR-111. They're my favorite series of drives ever. NEC ND-3500 chipset; Pioneer mechanism.

Pioneer publish the approved media list for their drives but it's not really detailed enough since it only lists by manufacturer while the firmware is operating on manufacturer plus media code: https://www.mfdigital.com/downloads/Pioneer%20111%20approved...

You can potentially get better results by patching your discs into your drive's firmware using MediaCodeSpeedEdit: https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/

Yes, of course there is software to patch firmware of "ancient" optical drives in order to support media that wasn't supported at the time of manufacture. Of course. Sometimes, I actually love 2025 a little bit. Thanks.

2004–2011 actually :)

https://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/changelog.txt

> 1.1.0.8 14 Oct 2007 — added read speed patch for PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111/112/212 drives, increasing +/-R read speed from 12x to 16x, +/-DL/RW from 8x to 12x. This patch is not available for 109/110 drives because 16x/12x is a bit too fast for smooth reading on these drives.

> 1.1.0.1 01 May 2007 — added RPC1 patch for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmwares, added flasher patch allowing downgrade and 'same to same' flashing for DVR-111 and DVR-112 firmware flasher

> 1.0.8.18 10 Sep 2006 — added support for PIONEER DVR-111D 1.29, DVR-111 1.29

> 1.0.8.17 18 Jul 2006 — added support for Pioneer (Buffalo) DVR-111D 8.25, DVR-111L 8.26