Owners of DVD+RW drives who thought they'd be able to upgrade them to use cheaper write-once DVD+R media via a firmware upgrade are out of luck, and the DVD+RW Alliance would appear to have egg on its face. Manufacturers themselves don't seem to have specifically promised this upgrade, but it appears they did kind of hope it would be achievable, and their sales levels must inevitably have benefited from the widespread misconception that you'd be able to upgrade for free.
Well, you can't. Hardware changes are required, and anything you heard to the contrary was, er, wrong. One of the places you might have heard it was in the press releases section of the DVD+RW Alliance web site, where on May 17th last year it was claimed that "the addition of write-once (DVD+R) capabilities to rewritable DVD+RW products slated to be introduced this summer [i.e., last summer]" was achievable.
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