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Errg this is so annoying! I didn't realize riplock would impede other processes, I hope I don't get the Hitachi in mine. It gets delivered Friday, and I don't even want to open it. Do you guys think I should return it and get an i5 instead for $200 less and a better drive?

Riplock was supposed to slow down a DVD drive so that the noise would not bother people watching DVDs. I'm sure there's another side-effect we all hate about it too.

The issue is that it is only supposed to activate with DVD Video, not data discs.
 
I don't think there is a rhyme or reason to what drive is in the computer. It all depends on what supplier has shipped what drive to the factory that week.

As an update, I "handbraked" a movie yesterday.

At HIGH PROFILE settings leaving all settings alone, ripping from the hard drive was 95fps and ripping from a DMG from my hard drive was also 95fps, it appears that at that point, its processor limited, not HD limited.

Ripping an iPod movie from a .DMG on my hard drive was 325+fps (and my HD was transferring at 18MBps so it looks to be processor limited as well). When I get home, I'll rip a DVD from the hitachi at that setting and let you know the results.

Oddly enough when I was making a .DMG from the DVD yesterday, ran at full speed. This "rip lock" feature appears to be very finicky. It's a stupid feature that should only "activate" when the DVD playing program requests it to be activated. This is a case of hardware and software developers never talking to each other or understanding each other.
 
Have a pioneer drive in my 2010 27" CTO i7
This is my third replacement and everything is perfect.

The three previous ones had Hitachi drives.

I might rip or burn cd/dvds twice a year so this doesn't concern me too much.
It is worth mentioning that Starcraft 2 installed significantly faster on the Pioneer than Hitachi?
 
Optiarc firmware flashing successful

I have a new imac i7 with an Optiarc SuperDrive, and after reading this forum, decided to snoop around for any work arounds. Found a site on Binflash, a terminal program that let's you flash your firmware, and from the same site followed a link to another site that had a new firmware for my drive to disable the Riplock feature. Tested using Handbrake and saw an increase from around 90 fps to 120 fps while ripping a DVD.

Besides having to use Teminal to perform, pretty simple.
 
dont know if this helps but I have a 2.66 i5 and it has a

OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5680H

It was a refurb as well.
 
I purchased my i7 on the fifth of october. It has a pioneer drive in it. Using the standard presets that come with HandBrake, i was getting 95+ average framerate. Opened iMovie and imported a 3 gig movie. HandBrake performance did not take a hit. Here is a screen cap so you can see what is going on.
 

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I did notice that the pioneer and hitachi burn about the same speed except with DVD-RW where the Hitachi is faster. I had a question for those 27" i7 folks that had pioneer drives. Do you have trouble loading a disc? It seems that the load mechanism on those drives stop the disc half way and you have to rotate this disc downward to load it.
 
Can anyone tell me how the pioneer superdrive loads a disc??? I wonder if this one is defective???
 
I had a Pioneer drive on an iMac 27" i7 for three days (bought in Dubai), it seemed to do Handbrake encodes very very fast although scratched a big circle on one of my dvds and made some very loud and strange noises (not just whirring but squeaking and clunking).

However after three days I had installed on the software I needed (4 discs) and wanted to start my 7th Handbrake encode and it refused to take any discs and spat out anything I put in, even the software discs it had previously installed it spat out.

I returned it and they replaced it with another one they had in stock. This one has an Optiarc drive, therefore I don't think there is a much of a pattern as where they get the drives from and which one you might end up with. The Optiarc drive does seem slower but it's much quieter and it works!

From what I have heard there seems to be some issues with the Pioneer drives, although they are fast.
 
My 27" i7 2.93ghz Refurb arrived yesterday from the Apple Refurb Store and it has the OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5680H, Revision 3AHB.

I am ripping in Chappelle's Show episodes from DVD using Apple Universal preset at 100-145 fps.
 
I'm quite jealous. I'm only ripping my DVDs at 58fps average on my 2009 i7 iMac.

HL-DT-ST DVDRW GA11N:

Firmware Revision: KA19
Interconnect: ATAPI
 
all new iMac SuperDrives impeded!

after reading thru this thread it seems no one has my combo of numbers, but we all experience similar SuperDrive retardation.

I just bought an iMac 27" 3.2 and it contains the Pioneer DVRTS09.
I also own a 2010 iMac 21" 3.06 and it contains the Optiarc DVD RW AD-5680H.

Both performed as good or bad on both DVD and CD ripping.

FYI, most here don't distinguish between handbraking & ripping a DVD.
When you handbrake a DVD straight from the optical drive you are both ripping & transcoding! So, with the transcoding portion highly dependant on your handbrake settings & CPU capacity, fps numbers in the context of this thread's topic seem meaningless to me.

I prefer to use RipIt first to just rip a DVD into a VIDEO_TS folder on my HDD, then handbrake it to whatever destination (iphone, AppleTV, etc) I need.

So, sticking to your average 2hr DVD, ripping with RipIt on both the Opticarc & Pioneer yields the same result, approx. 30mins. The same DVD in my external HL-DT (LG drive) takes only 15mins!!

Furthermore, CD ripping a 1hour album into iTunes results in 10x-20x (inner to outermost track) performance on both the Optiarc & Pioneer drives, while the external LG does this in 18x-30x. Again, nearly double the riplocked drives.

After applying binflash using Liggy's and Dee's modified firmware for the Optiarc drive, I now get 15mins rip times on my 2hr DVD, but here's the catch... NO CHANGE on the CD rip times into iTunes. Any ideas why?

Unfortunately, there's no such modded firmware yet available on the newer Pioneer drives. Anyone have any suggestions or news ?
 
Mine has the GA32N, and it sucks.

Those who have the GA32N, does HB take forever to scan a DVD prior to encoding? 20-30 min for me. I have not been able to find any firmware flash for it, has anyone else?

This is really upsetting me as I use HB everyday.

If no one has a fix- anyone know a good source for a replacement drive? Don't see any on macsales or newegg.
 
Got my IMac just before Christmas and whilst I've been playing WOW and testing everything as much as I can I seem to be really happy with mine. Was slightly depressed when I discovered I had the GA32N DVD along with a noisy 'Grumbling' hard drive. But overall I'm pretty happy with the system.

However came across this thread and decided to pull off a few Rips to check my system. Tried with Handbrake and didn't appear to have the problem as mentioned in the last post where it takes 40mins for HB to analyse a disk. Mine take a few minutes lets me select the track I want to Rip and then runs on through, I was pulling off a few Christmas DVD's Scrooged, Muppets Christmas Carol etc for over Christmas. Took around half an hour for each, using the AppleTV Preset.

Then thought I'd try the RipIt method to see how long a test disc would be, managed to pull off a screenshot around the 50% mark just to show my model and the Rip time, seemed to take around the 15min mark for my GA32N using my DireStraights Crimbo pressie concert @1 hour 30min length.

Doesn't seem to be as bad as many others have noticed but I could just be reading my stats all wrong, just wondering if anyone else was having a similar experience??

Need to update signature but specs: Imac 27" i7 2.93 4gb ram 1tb Hard-drive.

Update: Copied both the accompanying CD's of the concert, each 45 & 48 mins in length and each both took around 7 mins to rip. Hope it might be of help.
 

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Got my IMac just before Christmas and whilst I've been playing WOW and testing everything as much as I can I seem to be really happy with mine. Was slightly depressed when I discovered I had the GA32N DVD along with a noisy 'Grumbling' hard drive. But overall I'm pretty happy with the system.

However came across this thread and decided to pull off a few Rips to check my system. Tried with Handbrake and didn't appear to have the problem as mentioned in the last post where it takes 40mins for HB to analyse a disk. Mine take a few minutes lets me select the track I want to Rip and then runs on through, I was pulling off a few Christmas DVD's Scrooged, Muppets Christmas Carol etc for over Christmas. Took around half an hour for each, using the AppleTV Preset.

Then thought I'd try the RipIt method to see how long a test disc would be, managed to pull off a screenshot around the 50% mark just to show my model and the Rip time, seemed to take around the 15min mark for my GA32N using my DireStraights Crimbo pressie concert @1 hour 30min length.

Doesn't seem to be as bad as many others have noticed but I could just be reading my stats all wrong, just wondering if anyone else was having a similar experience??

Need to update signature but specs: Imac 27" i7 2.93 4gb ram 1tb Hard-drive.

Update: Copied both the accompanying CD's of the concert, each 45 & 48 mins in length and each both took around 7 mins to rip. Hope it might be of help.

Nice- thanks for the info- I am starting to think my scanning problem is not due to rip lock but something else, as no one else seems to have this problem, even with the GA32N.

FYI- I initially used migration assistant and pulled lots of stuff over from a Mini, and it slowed down the iMac noticeably, and made the HD a lil noisy.
I then did a clean install and manually added programs n such, and the HD seems much quieter now. Might just because I put less on it, but seriously do notice a difference.
 
Got my IMac just before Christmas and whilst I've been playing WOW and testing everything as much as I can I seem to be really happy with mine. Was slightly depressed when I discovered I had the GA32N DVD along with a noisy 'Grumbling' hard drive. But overall I'm pretty happy with the system.

However came across this thread and decided to pull off a few Rips to check my system. Tried with Handbrake and didn't appear to have the problem as mentioned in the last post where it takes 40mins for HB to analyse a disk. Mine take a few minutes lets me select the track I want to Rip and then runs on through, I was pulling off a few Christmas DVD's Scrooged, Muppets Christmas Carol etc for over Christmas. Took around half an hour for each, using the AppleTV Preset.

Then thought I'd try the RipIt method to see how long a test disc would be, managed to pull off a screenshot around the 50% mark just to show my model and the Rip time, seemed to take around the 15min mark for my GA32N using my DireStraights Crimbo pressie concert @1 hour 30min length.

Doesn't seem to be as bad as many others have noticed but I could just be reading my stats all wrong, just wondering if anyone else was having a similar experience??

Need to update signature but specs: Imac 27" i7 2.93 4gb ram 1tb Hard-drive.

Update: Copied both the accompanying CD's of the concert, each 45 & 48 mins in length and each both took around 7 mins to rip. Hope it might be of help.


It is only using 40-50% of my processor, I am sick of this riplock thing. If i buy an external blu-ray/dvd/cd combo burner drive, i am assuming it will get rid of this problem?


If you use iStats, you will see the cpu useage is nothing, because the dvd drive is the weak-link. When i convert movies that aren't on a dvd media, it will use 80-95% of the processor in handbrake. I am running snow leopard, latest hand-brake 64 bit, and the optical drive is the hold up.

I am going to call apple tech support to see if we can remove this riplock.


I am running a 2.93 ghz i7 27" iMac with 2TB hard drive, 4 gigs of ram.

I bought it refurbished from apple's website, only paid and ordered the 1tb and they sent me the 2tb :)
 
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