BTC DVD BDV316 - generic drivers Win98SE

All,

Being a real cheap-skate, I was attracted by the dirt-cheap BTC
BDV316

This came with no drivers - a bad sign from the start

A fruitless evening was spent trying to find drivers for this
device from the BTC Web site

Current status: DVD is recognised in Win98Se as a CD-Rom - with
some kind of "default" support - there are no drivers "visible" as
such under Device Manager.

Now the BDV316 reads CDs but it is Real slooooooooooooow in
comparison against,say, five year old Matsushita CD-Rom. I guess this
is the price of no real drivers.

However, Power-DVD 5 does not seem to be put off by such a situation
and seems to have no problem playing Region 1 DVDs (the main reason
for buying the unit). Image quality (brightness and contrast) is far
higher than with PowerDVD version 3 I was previously using.

So, are there "better" generic drivers for this BTC that will speed
up its performance?

Moral: before you buy single items, check the suppliers Web Site and
see if you can easily find, well organised drivers for current
versions of OS. This kind of support costs and adds to the price of
the unit.

I don't feel BTC is the worst in this respect but their support for
their prodcuts really does not merit the word Support - and maybe the
underlying technology is OK.

CLive

On 22 Jul 2003 03:53:26 -0700, Clive Long,UK <clive_long.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> wrote:
 > All,
 >
 > Being a real cheap-skate, I was attracted by the dirt-cheap BTC
 > BDV316
 >
 > This came with no drivers - a bad sign from the start
 >
 > A fruitless evening was spent trying to find drivers for this
 > device from the BTC Web site
 >

You need to look elsewhere for the speed problem since DVD/CDROM drives do
not use a driver and there's no reason to fault BTC for not having one. The
Nero CD Speed benchmark says my BDV316 only gets up to 40x instead of 48x
but that's probably not enough of a difference for it to seem slow to you.
Playing a DVD doesn't test speed since that's only the equivalent of around
7x CD. Make sure your discs are clean so that you can be sure the drive
isn't slow because of having to retry.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->