Stumbled across this when trying to find out why my 16x DVD media wouldn't burn at anything higher than 4x.

The Solution

Download your drive's latest firmware, feed it into MediaCodeSpeedEdit and you can edit the burn speeds for all media the drive can recognise. Save the modified firmware and re-flash your drive with it. Pretty neat!

User Interface Quirks

My only gripe is that the way you do it seems a little odd from the user-interface point of view. You select the media code of your blank discs by name, then double-click it to replace its burn speeds with the speeds of another media code.

But hey... it works!

Related Links

MediaCodeSpeedEdit - http://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/