DVD/CDRW drive

Status

• CD player works and rips fast
• CDRW writes at 8x (details below)
• DVD works

Device information

• Packet-writing patches for recent kernels
  
• WinXP says drive identifier string is MATSHITA DVD/CD-RW CW-8121
• Made by Matsushita, who make Panasonic
• Features (source)
  8X Speed CD-R Writing
  8X Speed CD-RW Writing
  24X Speed CD-ROM Reading
  8X Speed DVD-ROM Reading
  IDE/ATAPI Interface
  12.7mm Height
  Buffer Under Run Protection
  <Writing Method>
  Disc at Once, Session at Once
  Track at Once, Multi-Session
  Fixed / Variable Packet Writing
• For more detailed specs, see Panasonic's information page -- this is for CW-8121-B
• Firmware upgrades (none as of Feb 2003)
  

Installation history

I'm not sure that the following changes were necessary; as a general guide, leave the existing setup and if necessary add a /mnt/dvd or /dvd. Of course you may need to adjust permissions.

I changed the permissions on /dev/sg0 (/dev/cdrom and /dev/scd0 already had full), and then grip started working. I first diagnosed this by using "cdparanoia -vsQ", which found the device and displays the CD's tracks, and then

cdparanoia -B -- "4-15"

which in this case rips tracks 4 to 15. Once the permissions were set right, grip worked great -- the tracks are read at up to seven times playing speed (!), and then encoded to ogg very fast too. Basically, ripping is now working much better than I've ever expected. 

I found from /etc/fstab that the cdrom drive is at /dev/scd0 and did

ln -sf scd0 dvd

and chown steen.users dvd. I also created /mnt/dvd and did chown
steen.users and chmod 777 dvd. I then added

ln -sf /mnt/dvd /dvd

and did chown steen.users dvd. I left the cdrom definitions alone, only changing the permissions on /dev/sg0 to full.