using optical drives these days

[Christopher J. Bottaro]

i haven't really researched how to burn stuff in linux since maybe 4 years
ago with my 8x cd burner.  it was pretty straightforward then:  emulate
scsi with ide, then learn how to use cdrecord.

4 years later i have a dvd burner (8x nec 2500a) and things aren't quite as
simple as i remember them being.  i tried to research the subject using
google and found some disheartening topics...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124098

http://www.fokus.fhg.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
"Both RedHat and SuSE publish bastardized and defective variants of cdrtools
in their distributions. 
 If you have problems on RedHat or SuSE systems, first fetch a recent
original cdrtools source, compile it yourself 
 and run the original instead of broken software that illegally claims to be
cdrecord."

i've tried to get it working using my now defunct knowledge of cdrecord.

[root at semaphore cjb]# dvdrecord -scanbus
dvdrtools v0.1.4
Portions (c) 2002-2003 Ark Linux <bero at arklinux.org>
Based on:
Cdrecord 1.11a15 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2001 J�g
Schilling
dvdrecord: No such file or directory. Cannot open '/dev/pg*'. Cannot open
SCSI driver.
dvdrecord: For possible targets try 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Make sure you are
root.

what gives?  cdrecord -scanbus works fine.

dvdrecord speed=5 dev=1,1,0 -dummy /tmp/KNOPPIX_V3.4-2004-05-17-EN.iso
dvdrtools v0.1.4
Portions (c) 2002-2003 Ark Linux <bero at arklinux.org>
Based on:
Cdrecord 1.11a15 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2001 J�g
Schilling
scsidev: '1,1,0'
scsibus: 1 target: 1 lun: 0
dvdrecord: No such file or directory. Cannot open '/dev/sg*'. Cannot open
SCSI driver.
dvdrecord: For possible targets try 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Make sure you are
root.

also "cdrecord -prcap dev=/dev/cdrom1" tells me that my max write speed for
dvd+-r is 4x.  what the hell, my dvd burner is an 8x burner and works fine
at that speed in windows.

luckily k3b abstracts away all this technical bs for me, but still even k3b
errors out when i try to burn at 8x: :-( Failed to change write speed:
5408->10816.

can anyone give any good info on how to write dvd+-r in fedora core 2 and
why it only writes at 4x in linux?

thank you for the help.