Hi everyone, Today, I’ll show you the OWC Mercury Pro 5.25″ External Optical Drive Enclosure: This is an enclosure designed for Internal 5.25″ CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray drives. It uses a USB 3.1 Gen 1 connection to transfer files faster than when using USB 2.0. This mainly applies to Blu-Ray discs since they can have a very high transfer rate when compared to CD or DVD, hence having a USB 3.1 Gen 1 connection allows us to benefit by having…
Hi everyone, Remember my previous post where I was talking about the LiteOn iHAS524 C and mentioned the different optical pickup units this model use across its different revisions? Turns out that the SF-DS1XD OPU used in the iHAS524 B was having trouble burning DVD+R DL, so I began my search for a used iHASx24 drive from the A revision. On Friday, I got a used LiteOn iHAS124 A delivered. This model use the SF-DS19L OPU that all LiteOn iHASx24…
Hi everyone, Yesterday, I began working on my second collaboration for the exhale xHE-AAC USAC encoder. This time, I worked on adding an argument to print the software version on the console. The above is the main software, printing its information as well as how to use it. There was no option to print the version only. Ideally, I just wanted a way to print something like exhale version 1.0.3 …..so that I can easily parse it as I do…
Hi everyone, Yesterday, I collaborated on the exhale xHE-AAC Audio Encoder to add compatibility to compile the project on MinGW on Windows. The exhale project is an Open-Source xHE-AAC USAC encoder. It allows you to encode wave (WAV) files to M4A using this specific codec. Originally, compilation on Windows was done using Visual Studio, and this worked fine, but when compiling it on MSYS2/MinGW, it gave some issues, specifically: It also complained about fprintf_s, so some changes needed to be…
Hi everyone, Yesterday, I received my very first BDXL media. These are way more expensive than BD-R and about twice the cost of BD-R DL media. For my first BDXL recordable media, I decided to get the Verbatim 10-pack spindle. These seem to be one of the lowest-priced media when compared to 3-packs or 5-packs variants of other manufacturers. These BDXL discs are rated at 4x, but my LG WH14NS40 crossflashed to the WH16NS60 firmware detects them as having a…
Hi everyone, I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y720 RAM to 64GB. This laptop came with 16GB initially, but it’s very easy to upgrade it. I was browsing Amazon and found that the Samsung 32GB DDR4 SODIMM modules were the cheapest available, so I went ahead and ordered 2 of them. Upgrading it was as easy as removing the back cover: We can see the 2x 8GB RAM modules installed in the laptop here: And here they are removed: The part…
Hi everyone, On Saturday, I received the LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Writer Drive. This is my 3rd Blu-Ray writer and it will replace my LiteOn iHBS112 which was causing several bad burns. The other drive is the Panasonic UJ-260, which is a slim drive that burns discs successfully. This drive is one of the cheapest Blu-Ray XL writers available on Amazon. It is also able to read and burn CDs and DVDs. Here, we will see the drive unboxed and teared…
Hi everyone, In the past few days, I brought a LiteOn iHAS524 C DVD drive on eBay. This drive is quite rare and was being sold as used, but the unit seems to be in good conditions. The reason to have this drive is due to its unique LabelTag feature. This allows you to create labels on the data side of a CD-R and DVD+/-R. It, of course, will consume space, but the advantage is that you don’t have to…
Hi everyone, Today, I burned a few more Ritek Mini CD-R media, where I found out they have a surface issue: I didn’t realized this, but it seems to be a plant manufacture problem. I opened another of the 100-pack I have and it have the same problem. The problem is that the data was burning fine, with no errors on my Lite-On iHAS524, but it failed to verify on some parts of the disk, as it was approaching the…
Hi everyone, Yesterday, I received some Pocket/Mini CD-R I purchased on eBay, which were being sold for cheap due to them not being branded or not having their specs listed. The seller was selling 3 packs of 100 unbranded silver surface Mini CD-R, and since the price was lower compared to other branded media, I decided to buy all 3. The discs were wrapped with no spindle. The discs have a silver surface: Here we can see a single CD-R:…