Hopefully the famous Nils has published a firmware patch (version 1.06) in beta test. In addition to transform the DVR-108 into a region-free burner, it also allows all burning speed for all media.
Hereafter is the place to get this firmware:
http://forum.rpc1.org
Currently, you will still need a PC to flash the firmware of your DVR-108, since DVRFlash version 2 is still not available on Mac.
We have performed the test with DVD -R 8x Verbatim.
It took us 6min 58 to burn 4.4 GB at 16x on a DVD-R media (time recorded between the click to launch the process and the sound notifying the process end).
To determine the gain in time between 16x burning speed vs. 12x, we have performed a second test. At 12x, it took 7min to burn the same amount of data, so you hardly see the difference.
In order to be sure that this was not coming from the firmware, we have done a second test at 16x while monitoring data flow rate with Perfboard
The final data flow rate fits indeed with a 16x burning process. But the monitoring gave us the reason of such a small gain in time. The DVR-108 is burning at 16x only the last 300/400MB. But every time that the burning speed changes and increases, the burning process is paused for few seconds, which annihilate the gain obtained with 16x speed.
We have read on RPC1 forum that the firmware 1.10, not yet available, will improve this transition state by few seconds. At the end, as you might have already understood, the 16x speed is more a marketing aspect than a real technology breakthrough for the users.
We could not perform a double layer DVD burning test, since we did not have enough media for that, but as shown below, Toast recognizes perfectly a DVD+R9 media (a prototype media from Ritek).
