I may have discovered the "problem" in not being able to burn rewritable CDs with k3b. It seems the DVD burner brand might not work well with PLCOS & k3b.
I tried 3 different DVD burners, all Samsung, two internal and one external drives. They are identified by k3b as "TSSTcorp CD/DVDW". They error out when trying to verify the burn by not being able to read sector XXXX (it varies, but nearly always at about 80% of the data). When you try to run an md5sum on the burned disk, you get an "input/output" error (in any linux computer). All three seem to burn just fine in WinXP.
I put in another brand, a generic DVD burner ID'd by k3b as "ATAPI DVD A", and everything works just fine. More testing needed, but quite weird. Brasero still doesn't recognize the new drive.
Anyone else have this trouble with Samsung DVD burners and k3b?
Yes. I thought the Samsung burner was dying, but a cleaning of the laser lens with the drive removed from the machine, and the actual mechanism removed from the case, also revealed a foreign object present. I removed the foreign object, cleaned the laser lens with alcohol and a Bounty paper towel, reassembled the drive, then reinstalled it in the computer case. I still don't know if the problem was the foreign object, or the dirty lens, but all problems with the drive have disappeared, and it now works like new.
K3b works like a champ, for data, images, and audio/movie burning, and all burns, CD or DVD are done (with rare exceptions) on RW disks; CD-RW and DVD+RW. I've burned one DVD-R and one CD-R since then, for my son, on disks he furnished. Both of those burns were successful and presented no issues.
The burner is identified as;
TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S182M I've been burning disks on both the official 32 bit KDE release and the 64 bit test release, with equal performance.
