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We all know that the Teac CD-RW drives are actually ASUS based drives with different firmware, and as I can see the DVD recorders are based on the Pioneer A05 and A06 drives, and again with TEAC firmware.
What about the DVD-ROMs? I don't think that TEAC manufactures them. As I can see from the pictures they look pretty much to the Pioneers but their upper side is a little bit different. The Pioneer has a kind of hole on the top and the TEAC misses it.

Sa[V]aGe

The DV-516E is supposedly a Pioneer 120, it's said...in any case, it's a good drive....

It's actually a Pioneer DVD-500M. I flashed my TEAC with the Pioneer firmware, as a region free hack wasn't available then.

Anyway, this drive is fine with DVDs, but not DVD-Rs ! I got a horrible noise, like the drive was struggling to read them. I used quality (Panasonic, Mitsubishi) DVD-Rs that played back fine on my Lite-On dvd-rom. Switched back to the TEAC firmware, but it was the same.

I did a search at rpc1.org, and found that others had problems with this drive too (with respect to DVD-Rs).

Thanks for the correction.
Do you have the 516E or the 516EA? And which firmware does your drive have?
I know from Teac that the first version of the 516(E) had a 512 KB buffer and couldn't read DVD+R discs.
They fixed this w/ the 516EA, which can read DVD+Rs and now has a 256 KB buffer - they said the larger buffer wasn't necessary.
In any case, my 516EA reads all discs fine, w/o any undue noises.
My firmware vers. is 3.04.
The only hacked firmware I've seen is for the 516E.