LiteOn LH-20A1H, LL0C firmware has a bug?

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers LiteOn / PLDS / Sony Writer
#1

Hi together,

It seems that LiteOn LH-20A1H (LL0C) can not make a proper strategy for Taiyo Yuden T02 due to wrong default strategy and wrong working Hyper Tuning. Here are results of my tests:

LH-20A1H drive, Tayio Yuden DVD+R 8x (T02)

First 4 pictures i have already posted with an other post, so i give hier only
the reference:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f44/difference-between-resetting-learnt-media-resetting-hyper-tuning-227640/index2.html#post1963695

  1. 8x, Resetted drive, Default settings
    Hi PIE, bad beta and jitter. I have repeated this on several discs and all
    of them have the same picture. So, it is not media.

  2. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 1st disc
    Better level of PIE errors, but beta goes negative to -5.7% over -5% and has many stairs. According to the DVD standard beta must be as flat as possible and lay in the interval [+15, -5%].

  3. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 2nd disc
    It is worse. Beta goes to -7.8%.

  4. 6x, HT and OHT are activated, 1nd disc (with this speed)
    Probably the speed was too high, so i have switched to 6x and have
    received an average good burn. Jitter could be better.
    But, it was also the last one! Minimal beta here is -4.1%.

Here are coming new pictures that you will find in the next posts.

#2
  1. 6x, HT and OHT are activated, 2nd disc
    Beta slowly goes down. Now it is -4.8%.

LH-20A1H_SW_HT_OH-T02_4_6x-PX-712A.png524×710 26.1 KB

#3

I skeeped some discs because all of them are looking quite similar with
hard staired jitter and negative beta around -5%.

  1. 6x, HT and OHT are activated, 8nd disc
    According to some posts 201AH has a pool of 6 strategies to learn, so now
    all of them must be recorded with the same media type.
    Beta goes down over specification to -6.0%.

Here it is the second picture.
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f44/liteon-16a7s-16w1p-16-18-20a1p-h-s-l-fastburn-enhanced-overspeed-enhanced-oht-firmware-new-207033/index39.html#post1967263

In the first one you can see the the modded firmware from C0deKing also does not improve the situation with beta, but makes it worse. With this version of firmware beta goes to -11.2%.

#4
  1. 6x, HT and OHT are activated, 8nd disc
    PIE and PIF levels are good, but beta has strong stairs and continues to go down over specification to -6.9%.

Here i have stopped to kill my discs. You can see a clear tendency of the drive to generate more and more worse strategies with time if HyperTuning is on. Probably just after the first burn it would be possible to turn HyperTuning off and the drive will use this good strategy for all following burns without modifications. Will this work?

But, it is strange that drive has so strong variation in the generated strategies. After so many runs Beta and Jitter still have strong stairs and does not going to be flat. Beta goes too low to amaising -7% and has a tendency to go much lower. Actually this means that the drive uses too low laser power and underburns the disc. So, something is wrong with the algorithm controlling the power of the laser or generating new strategies. Is there some hope that this bug will be fixed in the next versions of the firmware?

LH-20A1H_SW_HT_OH-T02_9_6x-PX-712A.png524×711 22.5 KB

#5
  1. 6x, test burn with Plextor PX-716A, PoweRec is on.

A good burn. Low PIE and PIF levels, low jitter, low deviation of beta. So, it is possible to make a good burn on this media. Here on the beta you can clear see how power calibration of the drive tries to get 0.

What is wrong with LH-20A1H and why it is not able to produce the similar result?

PX-716A_T02_04_6x_PX-716A.png524×890 24.6 KB

#6

what does dvdscan report the beta to be? anyway why the concern about beta? dvd specs jitter < 9% (or was it 8%?) and no dvdrw I’ve ever used has ever been below the spec, and almost no one ever has any problems. I’ve had standalone problems with PIF levels, but rarely jitter or beta.

#7

Beta is also important. Beta shows the difference (Asymmetry) between the lengths of pits and lands. A negative beta means that, on average, the marks are underpowered (short). So, it shows how compatible your buns are. On an other drive a disc with a bad beta can be ~not readable~ at all.
If i am wrong, please technical people correct me. Actually, only on beta lines you can see changes in writing strategies and power calibration. Here you can find more information about it -
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/running-optimum-power-control-beta-70862/

Cutting to the bones, a minimal test should include PI, Jitter and Beta. Here are some examples: http://homepage2.nifty.com/yss/index.html
I do not understand why many people on this forum ignore to do that. Only few use DVDscan or PxScan. Nero CDspeed has very imprecise Jitter.

DVDscan has similar results. Here you will find the scans for pictures
No. 2 and 3. They are lower than the similar results with Plextor. Plextor has a litte axial drift in the beginning.

  1. equivalent for “2. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 1st disc”
    Plextor ~ -3% average, -5.7% min
    Lite-On ~ -5% average, -10.4% min

  2. equivalent for “3. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 2nd disc”
    Plextor ~ 5% average, -7.8% min
    Lite-On ~ -8% average, -14.6% min

  3. equivalent for “2. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 1st disc”
    made with Nero CDspeed

  4. equivalent for “3. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 2nd disc”
    made with Nero CDspeed

LH-20A1H_SW_HT_OH-T02_1_8x-LH-20A1H_Beta.jpg760×543 93.2 KB

LH-20A1H_SW_HT_OH-T02_2_8x-LH-20A1H_Beta.jpg760×543 93.3 KB

LH-20A1H_SW_HT_OH-T02_1_8x-LH-20A1H.png645×523 26.4 KB

LH-20A1H_SW_HT_OH-T02_2_8x-LH-20A1H.png645×523 25.9 KB

#8

I never scanned for beta, but looking at my PIF/PIE results of consecutive discs written with my unit with all learning features ON, I noticed that the drive doesn’t seem capable of deciding what the best strategy is and sticking with that when burning further disks! Instead it keeps oscillating between good and bad strategies, so generally speaking every other disc I wrote was of poorer quality (i.e. if disc 8 = OK, then disc 9 = bad, disc 10 = OK, disc 11 = bad, etc). I noticed this for a number of MIDs, so it seems to be a MID independent behavior. I also noticed that with earlier firmwares as well.

I posted a while ago my findings about this very annoying oscillating behavior here:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f44/lite-dh-20a4p-post-your-scans-here-231051/index8.html#post1930828

I really wish LiteON would fix that in further firmwares!

#9

[QUOTE=Narendil;1969176]Beta is also important. Beta shows the difference (Asymmetry) between the lengths of pits and lands. A negative beta means that, on average, the marks are underpowered (short). So, it shows how compatible your buns are. On an other drive a disc with a bad beta can be ~not readable~ at all.
If i am wrong, please technical people correct me. Actually, only on beta lines you can see changes in writing strategies and power calibration. Here you can find more information about it -
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/running-optimum-power-control-beta-70862/

Cutting to the bones, a minimal test should include PI, Jitter and Beta. Here are some examples: http://homepage2.nifty.com/yss/index.html
I do not understand why many people on this forum ignore to do that. Only few use DVDscan or PxScan. Nero CDspeed has very imprecise Jitter.

DVDscan has similar results. Here you will find the scans for pictures
No. 2 and 3. They are lower than the similar results with Plextor. Plextor has a litte axial drift in the beginning.

  1. equivalent for "2. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 1st disc"
    Plextor ~ -3% average, -5.7% min
    Lite-On ~ -5% average, -10.4% min

  2. equivalent for "3. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 2nd disc"
    Plextor ~ 5% average, -7.8% min
    Lite-On ~ -8% average, -14.6% min

  3. equivalent for "2. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 1st disc"
    made with Nero CDspeed

  4. equivalent for "3. 8x, HT and OHT are activated, 2nd disc"
    made with Nero CDspeed[/QUOTE]
    yes, beta is one measure of the properties of a burned disc, but by your same argument, a bad jitter can also affect readability of the 3t-11t is not in spec, yet I’ve never had readability issues even on the most picky readers if my jitter is ~11% and my beta is <-5%.
    on the other hand, I’m not sure how accurately consumer drives can measure jitter and beta… at least for error correction you can probe the chipset and see how many times it had to use correction.

#10

[QUOTE=cvs;1969243]I never scanned for beta, but looking at my PIF/PIE results of consecutive discs written with my unit with all learning features ON, I noticed that the drive doesn’t seem capable of deciding what the best strategy is and sticking with that when burning further disks! Instead it keeps oscillating between good and bad strategies …

I posted a while ago my findings about this very annoying oscillating behavior here:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f44/lite-dh-20a4p-post-your-scans-here-231051/index8.html#post1930828

I really wish LiteON would fix that in further firmwares![/QUOTE]

I have also found this oscilation of Lite-On drive. Plextor and Samsung drives do not have it. But, your burs are really not good. Very hign level of PIEs. I have had good results with my 20A1H on TYG03 with 16x. Something
is wrong with your drive. Make FE/TE tests of your discs and see if your drive can track and focus on them.

#11

[QUOTE=Narendil;1969346]But, your burs are really not good. Very hign level of PIEs. I have had good results with my 20A1H on TYG03 with 16x. Something
is wrong with your drive. [/QUOTE]

That TY T03 media is a pretty poor quality batch for a TY, nothing to do with the drive this time … it writes with PIE between 30-40 on all my other drives as well.

Regarding the other burns, some of that media is of really poor quality (particularly the 16x HP CMCMAG ones).

Also those were burned with the drive crossflashed to 20A4P, which most of the time gave worse and rather unpredictable results compared to the 20A1H LL0C fw I used before. Therefore I went back to LL0C which for my drive behaves much better than the 20A4P firmwares.

Even the TYG02 media used in those burns is not quite as good as a TY media should be (and used to be), but with LL0C the results are definitely better than those obtained with the 20A4P firmwares.

#12

I have found that after reset (with HT on) a first strategy that the drive generates is relative good. It is not brilliant, but it is be better than the default and any of the following generated. Did you tried to switch HT immediately after that off? Probably the drive will use this good strategy.