RAW DVD dumping discussion

[Jackal]

Some info on 2064 bytes/sector RAW DVD dumping:

Apparently, what LG drives do is, they read the buffer of the drive in order to get the RAW contents of a DVD. There are 2 tools for LG drives that can do this and one tool that works on Plextor drives (and also on several other drives?)!

Here's a tool by Truong that you can use to test the command on Plextor (and other?) drives. First, you have to read a sector the normal way (e.g. with isobuster), and then you can use this tool to save the buffer: http://vigi.dremora.com/rawdvd/readbuf_dump.zip.

If you have an LG drive, try one of the following tools instead (and use the different program name in the example):
Newer drives: http://vigi.dremora.com/rawdvd/ren_hit_lg_dump.zip
Older drives: http://vigi.dremora.com/rawdvd/hit_dump.zip

Usage:

readbuf_dump <drive letter> <output file> <start offset> <len>

Examples:

'readbuf_dump d mem.bin 0 235200' dumps the first 100 CD (2352-byte) sectors from the D: drive buffer
'readbuf_dump d mem.bin 0 206400' dumps the first 100 DVD (2064-byte) sectors from the D: drive buffer

Unfortunately you can't use this tool to dump complete cd's, so we're working on a solution for that!

Many thanks again to Truong for the tools..

[Jackal]

ps. the 'Read Buffer' command for Plextor etc. drives is documented here: http://www.13thmonkey.org/documentation … andset.pdf  (page 164 of the internal document).

[themabus]

officially unofficial friidump 0.5.0
http://www.mediafire.com/?mzmyntwmowy

- Regions: Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, PAL-X, PAL-Y.
- Updated publisher list from http://wiitdb.com/Company/HomePage
- Included GDR8082N & GDR8161B as supported Hitachi drives.
- Lite-On, Renesas & vanilla memory buffer access commands.
- Shifted methods 1..4 to 0..3 and added new ones 4..6
  Associated known drives with default methods.
- Additional commandline parameters:
  stop, speed, command, type, size

should work with most Lite-Ons, maybe other MediaTek based drives (Asus, Dell, Sony, etc.)
though ~1100 MB/h was most i could get out of mine
and it did need swapping

first thing to try to see whether it works on your drive
would be some PC DVDs - try it with all commands & method 0

if program can get seeds - buffer reading works
so you can proceed with testing methods 4->5->6->1->2->3

if PC DVD works and GC/Wii does not, your drive needs swapping

if you are going to swap DVDs, be sure to use '--type' or '--size' parameter


please report your results here

edit:
btw you can use CTRL+C to halt program's execution if something goes wrong
or it takes too long, etc.

[Jackal]

Hi,

many thanks for this.. gamecube dumping is working on Plextor now (with command 0)! is there any way to speed up dumping? trying different methods now, but it seems to be stuck at 28.47 mb/h (~32 kb each cycle, which takes maybe 3 seconds)!.. maybe you can add a new vanilla method that reads as many sectors as requested at a time? because I think the Plextor caches much more sectors (>500) with each read, so this could speed up the dumping dramatically, at least for command 0 drives.. (with 500 sectors each cycle it would be at least 30 times faster than it is now)

Also, it seems like the raw output for normal dvd's is not correct.. would it be possible to support normal DVD's also? 

[themabus]

oh, great, i didn't think Plextor would.

yeah, we could definitely try this.

it's strange though that method 4 does not work, it's the same as 0,
but with streaming parameter set, so less error correction would be done.

maybe we could find something else, that works with Plextor,
like there are some parameters, that control error correction, but Lite-On wouldn't allow to change those,
maybe Plextor does.

i'll check on raw output, didn't test it to be honest, thank you for this.

edit:
and actually i forgot to add command for Samsung...

ok, i'll fix those things and then we could try to get more performance out of Plextor and Samsung (if it works)
with some specific methods.

btw, does Plextor work without swapping?

[Jackal]

Actually, the Plextor DOES work with lite-on methods 4-6, but speed appears to be the same as method 0.

And I just tried, it does work without swapping! But you have to use stop command first. Samsung might also work then, but we'll need the new command Maybe swapping isn't needed after all then.

Looking forward to testing larger cycles and the samsung drive..

edit: I just tested my plextor buffer capacity and it's around 624 sectors for DVD's, so 500 or 600 should be a safe value, although a parameter would be ideal (different drives can have different limits).

[iR0b0t]

- Plextor, worked for me too, with and without swapping, when dumping without swapping i had to force the disc type, otherwise the drive freezes and needs an os restart !

- Lite-On, didn't work, it stuck on disc seeds retrieving procedure, and it has never finished retrieving when i tried.

[themabus]

ok, added parameters, added Samsung's command as 'vanilla 2384'
but it isn't currently associated with any drives and has to be selected manually
restricted Lite-On to that single tested model
and some fixes here and there

http://www.mediafire.com/?zthygznudnt

raw output works for me though, but iso output for non Nintendo DVDs would be incorrect
i'll either have to add regular descrambling algorithm
or remove this option sometime later, now for testing it's good

edit:
Lite-On's methods are now joined in single one - method1
method2 might work faster with Plextors, it's as 1 but without cache flushing

syntax for methods with parameters is --method0=16,16 or in short form -016,16

first value is how many sectors to read from DVD, so smaller might produce faster results
2nd value - nr. of sectors to fetch from cache, effect from changing this won't be linear
but generally it's better to keep it close to multiple of 16

[Jackal]

Thanks! Some feedback while I continue to test:

- Method 2 isn't working on Plextor
- Command 1 isn't working on my SH-162D.. but unlike other commands, it doesn't abort retreiving disc seeds right away (none of the commands cause any reading.. maybe swap disc is a must after all?)
- I'm unable to get any noticeable speed increase on Plextor (for instance, this parameter: 'friidump -d d: -c 0 -T 0 -i test.iso --method0=16,512' is about the same speed as before So maybe a bug with the parameters? Requested sectors and Expected sectors stays at 16 for every parameter that I tried (except when I do 16,64 but then it fails at retrieving disc seeds).

[themabus]

oh yes, they're limited to 100, so 512 resets to default value
but if 64 fails, it's too much already
i guess we'll have to to find something special for Plextor

does Samsung work with regular DVDs?