Thank you Andyvand for an excellent tweak. But despite my efforts I just can't get it to work for me.
I'm running Snow leopard 10.6.5 64bit on a HP DV8-1200.
In the Release leopard folder I've opened the kext contents and I've edited the plist file to input my drive details from IOreg.
I've put in my DVD drive vendor id as hp, and the drive type as shown in my IOreg as CDDVDW TS-L633N.
Saved the plist file, installed the kext via kext helper and rebooted, but no success.

Perhaps I'm missing something simple, could you possibly share some ideas on where I'm going wrong?
Thanks in advance!