Mustek R100A DVD Recorder

This site is just a general information pages for owners of the Mustek R100A DVD Recorder. The recorder is a cheapish DVD recorder that uses DVD+RW and DVD+R discs.

I bought mine from Dick Smiths Electronics (DSE) in New Zealand. DSE in Australia sell the same model and both the NZ and AUS models have recently been replaced with a DSE branded one which is exactly the same (just a different badge). Further to this DSE have introduced yet another DSE branded DVD recorder (December 2004), I believe this is another Mustek in disguise as it features the same specs and multizone hack.

I’ve found there isn’t very much information on these recorders out there on the internet (especially for NZ and AUS) so I thought I would jot down the info I have found useful and may help someone else.

UPDATE: 7th May 2005, After 6 months of good service my Mustek recorder started acting up. It took ages to boot up and would often get stuck (on the HELLO or LOADING display). The delay got gradualy worse so I returned it to DSE and the swapped it without too much trouble for a brand new DSE model. It appears to have the older firmware however the favourite channel menu option has disappeared. The machine also does not seem to run as hot as the original Mustek one.

UPDATE: 4th July 2006, Unfortunately a couple of months ago my second Mustek started playing up - it would not recognise any prerecorded discs and took ages to load recorded DVD's. Since I had an extended warranty I returned it to DSE expecting a new one to be handed over. As they had no stock left they gave me a refund. I have since purchased a Phillps DVD recorder with a hard drive which is (obviosly) very nice. I will make this page available as long as I can since it may be of some use to somebody some day.

The R100A is actually a great little DVD recorder. I got mine for real cheap as it was an open box product at the time the DSE branded ones were being phased in. Although the machine performed well I was a bit disappointed with it initially. The quality of the recordings was great but I found there were a few little quirks that really bugged me. The most annoying was that the DVD recorder boots up to show you what’s on the disc (fair enough) but if you want to switch to the TV tuner you have to press the DVD/REC button and then hop through all the input source to get to the tuner. Since there are RCA, S-VIDEO and SCART connections you get to watch TV after 4 or so button presses (luckily this can be fixed by a firmware upgrade - see next section).

While mentioning the inputs, it probably a good time to mention this recorder has them in abundance! While these no i-link (like on the fancier recorders) there are RCA inputs, S-VIDEO and of course 2 SCART connectors (one input and the other output). SCART connectors are a bit unusual but since these players are sold in Europe too they must come standard. This is great news for SKY digital subscribers since there is a SCART connectors on most SKY decoders. Since I dont have SKY I used a SCART to RCA/S-VIDEO converter (from DSE) to add an additional RCA input source for my video camera.

On the output side the R100A feature composite, S-VIDEO and component outputs. The audio is 2 channel, although the recorder does feature a 5.1 coaxial and optical output.

The R100A records TV like you would with a VCR. You can’t record multiple programs at once and you can’t time shift/chase play like DVD-RAM recorders but the scheduler is pretty darn good. It can be set for one off recordings, daily, weekdays (ie mon-fri) or weekly (eg every friday) which is handy. The recorder has various quality settings but I find the LP setting just fine and it gets me 3-4 hours of recording on a single DVD+RW.

Unlike DVD-RAM, DVD+RW recorders can only record from the last recorded program. Basically this means (assuming you have three hours of recording) that if you record a two hour program and then a half hour program, then watch & delete the two hour program you will only have half an hour of recording time left (since the recording starts after the half hour program). This isnt too much of a problem and I find watching the programs in reverse order (ie the newest first) is a sufficient work around.

The recorder has an "auto chapter" feature that inserts chapters about every 5 minutes so you can skip chapters to fast forward quickly. The recorder does allow you to insert new chapters after recording on DVD+RW discs but I hear reports that some DVD player’s don’t recognise them. The recorder does show a thumbnail in the DVD's new menu. This seems to come from the first few frames of the recording and can be changed after the recording is complete. The recording name unfortunately cant be altered, so you are left with names like PRG-002 08:00pm 18/10/2004 which translate to the date, time and channel (or input method eg SCART will appear as the title if you recorded from a SCART source).

The TV tuner works well and picked up all the NZ channels when it intitially searched for them. Its a bit fiddly to operate but you can remove and sort the channels it finds so that TV is on channel 1 etc. You cant however rename the channels with real names (ie PRG-001 cant be renamed to TV1).

Playback is good quality too. A nice feature is a commercial skip button which shoots you forward 30 seconds. Sadly this sometimes tends to over shoot the mark and you have to rewind a few seconds (I've seen a fancier recorder which has this feature but also has a button to go back 15 seconds). The commercial skip button unfortunately only works on home recorded DVD and not normal movie DVD's so you can’t skip past boring scenes in a movie.

The recorded DVD+RW discs do play in my Mustek DVD player but did skip in a few places (entire chapters some time). This was probably due to the player being a bit old & crappy and probably not the discs themselves.

The recorder also boasts CD, MP3, JPEG picture disc and Kodak picture disc playback. I have yet to try any of these except CD playback which features a basic menu for changing tracks.

Over all I am very satisfied with the recorder and am much happier with the machine since I had the firmware upgraded.

PS Tone magazine reviewed the unit in their May-June 2004 issue (#28). The reviewer brought up a lot of the same points I have mentioned but was overall very impressed by the unit and from memory the recorder got a rating of 4/5 stars (which is great since the magazine normally only reviews top end units).

After reading a few vague threads about firmware upgrades I thought I would take a look around. I found two Mustek sites (link further down) with firmware for the R100A. Apparently there are various models of the R100A out there. The American model doesn’t look the same and doesn’t have SCART connectors and then the European model which looks the same comes with one or two SCART connectors. There were different firmware’s for different versions of the recorder and more versions for PAL/NTSC versions of these. Not knowing which one to use I contacted the DSE head office in NZ to see which one they recommended. They in turn told me to rather bring the machine in and get an upgrade. I took the machine in and got it back 20 minutes later with the upgraded firmware.

The updated firmware doesn’t look any different but the menus did react faster and (hooray) the annoying DVD to TV thing was fixed. The recorder now switches to TV straight away when you press the DVD/REC button. You only need to press the source button on the remote if you wish to record from SCART, RCA etc

Later, I took another look at the Mustek site and noticed on the European site that there were two types of firmware. One for the recorder (ie menus etc) and one for the actual DVD-RW drive (aka loader firmware). The loader firmware promised better compatibility with DVD+R/RW discs and from what I could see there was only one type. So I down loaded the firmware and applied the upgrade. The update was recognised and completed successfully. Unfortunately it didn’t seem to make any difference in terms of what media it would and wouldn’t recognise.

UPDATE: 7th August 2005, Firmware woes! After a couple of months with the lame firmware on my DSE model, I decided to email the DSE service centre to ask if they had an upgrade. After a week I recieved an email and they sent a CD out to me. I popped the CD-R into the recorder and applied the upgrade. Alas, when it was finished I could not set the time (doh) and the LCD display was all garbled. Ok, I thought maybe I was doing something wrong but when it didnt have any sound with the channels it found it wasnt looking good. I popped the CD-R into my PC and saw that the name of the firmware file had the words R100LB in it. The R100LB is a totally different beast and Im surprised the firmware loaded.

The firmware was very nice to look at but wasnt very functional. Below are some images from the firmware upgrade;

After panicing I emailed the DSE person only to find he was on leave! Out of desperation I tried the R100A firmware on the Mustek.de site, which was even worse. The Mustek.de firmware would only pick up the UHF channels available in New Zealand.

I had a dig around on Google and found a firmware for a Yukai R100A (which is a clone of the Mustek) but it had the same results.

I then had a look on the Google groups forums and found someone in New Zealand that had been sent a firmware upgrade by DSE. Jon from www.diamondimporting.com was nice enough to upload the firmware to his website in order for me to download it. Big thanks to Jon! If any one requires the firmware please contact me.

Using Jon's firmware I revived my player to it's former glory. Jon's firmware also allowed me to re-order the channels like I used to be able to do.

A major difference in the firmwares I tried was that the New Zealand/Australia firmware asks the user to select a country after the time is entered. The country selection was also available in the setup menu.

HQ(High Quality): to record about one hour
SP(Standard Play): to record about two hours
LP(Long Play): to record about three hours
EP(Extended Play): to record about four hours
SLP(Super Long Play): to record about six hours

According to the Mustek site (Taiwan) the following pixel/lines combinations are used for recording on the R100A. As you may notice below the pixel/line combination is the same for HQ/SP and LP/EP so I suspect they must use different compression rations to achieve more recording time with the same pixels/lines.

Recording Type	Recording Time	Pixels	Lines
HQ	1 hour	720	576 (PAL) 480 (NTSC)
SP	2 hours	720	576 (PAL) 480 (NTSC)
LP	3 hours	360	576 (PAL) 480 (NTSC)
EP	4 hours	360	576 (PAL) 480 (NTSC)
SLP	6 hours	352	288 (PAL) 240 (NTSC)

Below are some sample images recorded from an analog TV signal with the LP recording quality. Clicking the images below will show the image in its full size.

As you can see the loader firmware is the same for all the models. The menu firmware does seem to vary from model to model and country to country.

*NB* I take no responsibility for anyone using these firmware updates. They can cause your system to die if done incorrectly and I accept no liability for you attempting any of these updates. You have been warned!!!

I haven’t tried a lot of DVD+R/RW media with the recorder but have found some that don’t work. DSE suggest Verbatim and Mitsubishi brands on their NZ website. I personally use Verbatim and have not had any issue with these discs.

Brand	Type	Works?	Confirmed?	Seller	Price
Imation	DVD+R	YES	YES	DSE	$3
Imation	DVD+RW	YES	YES	DSE	$4.50
Mitsubishi	DVD+RW	YES	NO	DSE	$3
Datalot	DVD+R	NO	YES	The Warehouse	$3
TDK	DVD+R	YES	YES	The Warehouse	$12 for 5
TDK	DVD+RW	NO	YES	?	?
Verbatim	DVD+RW	YES	YES	?	?
Sony	DVD+RW	YES	YES	?	?
Excel	DVD+R	YES	YES	Freebie with PC Authority Magazine	?

If you have tried and confirmed any other brands of DVD+R or DVD+RW that work (or don’t work) let me know and I will add them to the list.

There are a number of hacks for the R100A. The most important one of these is the region setting. The hack for VCD is a bit of an unknown as the hack works but I have no idea what it does as the unit seemed to play VCD's out of the box.

Update: using 8887 to turn VCD off makes the machine not recognize VCD's.

VCD Setting
Disk Draw Open
Press Return button on remote
Press info button on remote
Press 8889
VCD ON will appear on the screen

Disk Draw Open
Press Return button on remote
Press info button on remote
Press 8887
VCD OFF will appear on the screen

Multizone Procedure
Disk Draw Closed
Press Return button on remote
Press info button on remote
Press 8880
SET REGION FREE will appear on the screen
Different regions can be set by replacing the 0 with the appropriate number after the 888

Type	Write	Read
DVD+RW	Y	Y
DVD+R	Y	Y
DVD-RW		Y
DVD-R		Y
ImageDVD		Y
SVCD		Y
VCD		Y
CD		Y
CD-RW		Y
CD-R		Y