Congrats on the duplicator! You'll soon wonder what you ever did without it.

I'm curious why you went with a smaller tower than your controller is capable of.

Well, I have room for two more burners, that would bring me to 7, but good point, I suppose I should have gone with a 9 tower.

I have searched for an online manual for the wytron controller but cannot locate one, hoping you can provide some info.

Do the dvd burners have to be identical?

What is the usb interface kit?

When using a hard drive for images how is it partitioned/formatted by the controller or by a pc? How do you transfer the image file from pc to the hard drive? I will be using the removable drive tray and assume it is drag and drop file transfer.

Are the image files .iso or video_ts folders?

Any info would be appreciated, have dvd copies due from a school play and this could be a good investment.

THANKS

There's nothing in the manual, such as it is, that says that the burners have to be identical, but in theory, I suppose you would have less compatibility issues if you use the same burner.

The manual says that you ue the master reader to load the image into the hard drive. I'll continue to read if you can do this via usb.

The best I can see from the manual, the USB is so you can connect to a pc to use the entire duplicator.

I've just burned from a master disk, i.e. dvd-rw and dvd-r.

I have two purchases that I have found to be priceless. One of them is my camera dolly, and this duplicator being the other.


If you do projects that are more than just a couple of copies, this is definately a way to go. I built this one for less than 500 bucks.

Ordered the parts today, if all goes well should be duplicating five at a time by next week. Thanks for the info, I went with the wytron controller.

Just want to make sure....the "Burners" is what you got 7 of to duplicate and the "Rom Drive" is what you use to hold the original?
Thanks

Yes, my duplicator will hold the one rom drive, then 7 targets. I only bought 5 for now, but I can add two extras later.

Took about an hour to assemble.

Duplicator has 4 nec 3540a recorders, hard drive in a removable caddie and pioneer 104 source drive.

Still trying to navigate the lcd menu of the wytron controller but it will definately be a time saver. About 28 minutes to rip the source dvd to the duplicator hard drive and then about ten minutes to make the copies. By removing the hd tray the pioneer 104 defaults to the source drive for a disc to disc copy.

Now I just need to save enough money to buy 4 more nec burners!

Yeah, as nice as the Wytron controller is, they could have spent some more time on the manual.

Prior to building my duplicator, I was doing the whole 1 disc at a time, for a project that had 40plus dvd's.

So it was awesome popping the disk in to the rom drive and hitting the 'majic' button.

You might want to do some time comparisons to burning your project to disk instead of to your hard drive. The rom drive is about 20 bucks or so.

It's also my understanding that you can connect the whole tower to your computer and burn straight to the duplicator. I believe that's what the usb port is for.

Like I said, Wytron could do a little more with thier manual.

I'm glad you like your duplicator. I know from first hand experience it's a major time saver.

My post from yesterday seems to have vanished...

28 minutes to rip a DVD? That seems slow. I can't remember ever having a DVD take that long. I think there's a setting to change the read speed somewhere, make sure all the speed options are on 'auto'.

I know that I have issues with printables at high speeds, so the controller may throttle down, which is understandable.

I know even though I have 16x sony dvd burner in my computer, I can't burn certain printables faster thatn 6x, even though they are supposedly burnable at 16x according to the manufacture, it's a sham I say a sham!. :}

Is a Hard Drive needed?
 

My partner and I are new to the Video business I just finished burning our 90th or so DVD for a football tournament video. I did this one disc at a time on 2 computers. I'm here to say I have a lot better things to do with my time.

We have another tournament now to edit. It will fill two dvd's and 50 or so customers have order them.

In January we have a Bridal show we are setting up a booth in and want to hand out dvd's to prospective clients.

I think I need a duplicator.

Would it be best to have a hard drive built in to the unit so you can burn an image to the dvd's?

I have had some bad experiences copy from disc to disc on a computer.

I also don't want to spend $500 or so on a home made unit only to regret it and have to spend $500 more to buy one that works.

So do I need a hard drive. Also is therea book or some place I can get more info on all the exact specs I need before I purchase all the hardware? I am planning on ordering this week.

Please help!

I think there are media issues with the makers of certain dvd recorders. That is one reason there are so many "hacked" firmware releases available. The drive is capable of burning the media at the rated speed, but the drive manufacturers disable the maximum speed on certain media. Don't know why but I'm sure there is a reason for it in the corporate world.

q: Would it be best to have a hard drive built in to the unit so you can burn an image to the dvd's?

a: the hard drive allows you to store an image of the original dvd and make copies from the image. The advantage is you do not need the original dvd and you can store multiple image files on one drive. So you could have the football tournament image file on partition aa and the bridal show demo on partition ab. I have made copies from both an image file and dvd disc. All burns were successful and completed in under ten minutes. The hard drive is a convenience but is not necessary. However, hard drives are inexpensive and worth considering.


q:Also is therea book or some place I can get more info on all the exact specs I need before I purchase all the hardware?

a: I looked for as much info as possible on the net and found few turotials or instructions. I went with the same controller as steven and it works great. The layout of the board is simple to understand. The only two connections are power and ide cables. The lcd menu is a bit confusing but I think that may be the same for any controller whether you build it yourself or buy one preassembled.

Given the options of buying the duplicator pre assembled or building it yourself
depends on your situation. The cost is less to build and you will have a better understanding of how it works. I will be glad to answer any questions that may help you with your decision.

IDE controllers, promise bad for CD/DVD dupes
 

Well, I am currently building a render/burner box using an older asus motherboard and 2GHz P4, using 3 Benq 1640 DVD burners. I used a promise Ultra100tx2 IDE controller for one of the burners and it didn't work. A little research on the net, and info provided by Ahead(Nero, the software I am using), suggests that many of the IDE controller cards don't cut it for ATAPI burning devices as they don't support DMA (and other problems) with CD drives, which in turn leads to buffer underruns. Also, apparently Promise adapters are simply problematic for use in dupe towers. Anyway, it seems that SIIG controllers are the way to go. I bought the SIIG|SC-PE4B12. It's a 2 channel pci card $32 at newegg. I thought this might be useful info to include in this thread rather than start a new one. cheers! Mark

Hard drive issues
 

Okay, I really need to get one of these. Since the price difference is so little in regards to building one myself or purchasing one on eBay, I'm probably going to go the eBay route. That said, can I add a hard drive myself? How do you set up the partitions correctly?

On some of the eBay deals, you can pay extra for a hard drive, but they usually top out at 250 or 300 GB and I want at least a 400 GB in the system.

Thanks!!
Joe