Recent, key-free versions of cdrecord seem to be called things like 2.01.01a21. I've taken the number after the second period to be a "branch" number (for want of a better term) and consider it to trump patch-level and to indicate, if greater than or equal to 1, the key-free DVD burning capability. Hence, I've done the following: Added a VERSION #define for 2.01.01a18 as the first "key free" version. (CDRECORD_VERSION_KEY_FREE in xcdroast.h) Added a "branch" member to struct version_id Rewritten parse_version_str() in xtools.c to use the "branch" member in version_id while maintaining sensible interpretations of version strings having zero or one period characters. (incidentally dropping use of deprecated strtok() ) Altered compare_versions() to use a long int as the "big number" representation of a version string, with major and minor version numbers being shifted left two decimal digits and "branch" slotted in where "minor" used to be - the comparison results for version strings with no "branch" number are unchanged because "branch" is just set to zero in these cases - the actual numbers assigned to major and minor components are 100x greater but that doesn't affect the outcome. With these changes, "key free" versions are correctly identified as recent enough to have DVD support, removing the need to supply the "-n" switch for these versions, and hence removing the scary warnings associated with the -n switch. Altered the meaning of curset.isProDVD, already an integer, to additionally code the "no key required" information derived from "branch number 01 or greater". With my patches, isProDVD set to zero means "no DVD support", as before, set to 1 means "DVD support, key required" and set to 3 means "DVD support, no key required" - the last case then suppresses the warning about the need for a valid key. This is largely cosmetic I suppose, but scary warnings tend to result in confused emails from newcomers who don't know where to look for instructions, so might be better suppressed when they're not needed. Hope some of these prove useful to someone else, but of not no worries, they're useful to me. Many thanks, Carl Williams