Thanks, but in my case they already are:
Code:
bash-3.1$ groups
users lp wheel floppy audio video cdrom games plugdev power scanner
Also, when I said udev loses track of the optical devices after a while, that is exactly what appears to happen. If there is no disc in them, they don't show up in lspci and even dmesg shows nothing. As long as I have a disc in them, that doesn't happen.
This happens whether they are mounted by hal or in the fstab. I think they dont wake up after going into powersaving/sleep mode.