I apologise if this type of topic is discussed a lot but I couldn't find a thread that specifically tackled this problem. My problem is that I just bought an external Freecom DVD burner that I connect to my Compaq desktop which is about 2 years old. 1GHz, 256MB RAN. On the advice of a friend and many forum posters, I decided to download the trial versions AnyDVD and CloneDVD2 to back up some of my DVDs. The first one I tried was "Master And Commander". I can't get it to work at all, the playback sticks every 5 to 10 seconds and this happens on my PC and home player. Instead of burning directly to disk, I then tried saving the files to my Hard Drive. When I played these back, the playback was fine so obviously the problem lies with the burning process, not the ripping. I used the exact same process to back-up "Starsky And Hutch" and it worked fine. The difference being that "Master And Commander" is 132 minutes long and "Starsky And Hutch" is 98 minutes so the compression is much less on S&H. Any help on this one would be greatly appreciated. PS. I also noticed that even though I have write speed set to 4x (and the media is 4x), it still takes about 75-80 minutes to burn S&H. Why is this?
hi roonsa The one thing you failed to mention, is what kind of media are you using? Sounds like you may be using the cheap stuff,try ritek go4 or verbatim. good luck jim
Sorry Jim, should've mentioned media. It's Panasonic DVD-R. I'm not too clued up on media, what's the best ones to go for?
did you have any firewall or antivirus or ANYTHING running in the background when you were burning? hmm - thats a long burn speed, i have a 1.10 GHz and 256 Ram it usually takes me 25-45 minutes... try a good defrag aswell - that can dramatically slow down and mess up your burning plus jims right - are you using cheap media?
Thanks, Loner, didn't think of that. I did close down all running programs at the time but I always have my firewall running as I'm on Broadband. It's just the freeware version of Zone Alarm that's running. Will that make such a difference?
As Jim has indicated, poor media could be a source of your problem - freezing etc usually associated with low quality media or use of labels on DVD. Your burning time is extremly long - even with a low spec system 13-15 minutes is the norm. Check to see if you have DMA enabled rather than PIO. Also with external burner ensure you are using USB2 and not USB1.
hi again roonsa colw,and loner make very good points,check out what colw said by going to your device mananger,right click my computer/properties/hardware/device manager. then check out this thread:http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx If this doesnt work then right click the locked drive and uninstall,reboot,the drive will reinstall itself Panasonic btw wouldnt be considered good media in this forum. More expensive isnt always better,you can get ritek go4 at meritline.com for less than .70(us) good luck and welcome to the forum jim _X_X_X_X_X_[small] you should never take life too seriously....you'll never get out alive!! procrastinate now...dont put it off till tomorrow if you can read this..you dont need glasses.[/small]
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. This is the 1st time that I've ever posted to any forum and I must say I now realise what I've been missing. I will check out your suggestions tonight when I'm back home from work (on my lunch break just now - I'm based in the UK, just in case you hadn't guessed already). Thanks again. Paul, Glasgow.
I just want to thank the guys who replied to this thread and this forum in general as the advice has been invaluable. I am not a PC techie by any stretch of the imagination and didn't have a clue about DVD-Rs or ripping and burning. Now, after going through this forum and posting my thread, I feel I have the perfect set up. I took back my external DVD burner and replaced it with an internal device which was a lot easier to fit than I feared. My back-ups now take 40-45 to complete (rip and burn) and I feel that is acceptable. Thanks again!
