i don't have much experience burning. but the few times i have burned at 16x it has taken 5-8 hours to burn just one dvd (is that the normal time?) during burning periods i just leave my computer running without touching it in fear that anything like playing games or watching videos on my computer might cause glitches in the finished dvd. would multitasking cause any problems during burns or are my fears unfounded?
Multitasking can have an effect on your burns but this sounds like your DMA is off. http://www.dvdplusvideo.com/dvdguide005.html
16X should take about 6 minutes. Most people will recommend burning between 8 and 12X, It sounds as if your computer's DMA is off, or your cable setup for the drives is incorrect. Is your burner and hard drive on the same cable? Some burners like to be on the different cable than the hard drive, better data transfer rates. Check your jumper settings on the burner, It should be on cable select. Look here for info on checking you DMA settings. Windows XP users: check your DMA settings! Perform the following steps to make sure that your Windows XP installation has DMA enabled for IDE devices: 1. Under DEVICE MANAGER, open IDE ATA/ATAPI CONTROLLERS. 2. On the PRIMARY and SECONDARY IDE CHANNELS, open up their PROPERTIES display. 3. In PROPERTIES click on the ADVANCED SETTINGS tab. 4. Make sure that TRANSFER MODES is set to DMA IF AVAILABLE. and not PIO. If any changes were made, reboot your computer. another useful guide. DMA Guide Also, check to make sure that your drive has the latest firmware, look here for firmware downloads. Firmware. If you could, please post your computer's specs, CPU speed, Ram available, Memory, Operating system, etc. Hope this helps.
Multitasking is fine during encoding/transcoding etc but only ok during burning if you have a modern PC that has sufficient 'umph'. As to DMA, it's not relevant for external burners if those burners are USB2.0 connected... (i don't know about Firewire)
But doesn't usb 1.0 support 12Mb/sec data rate transfer? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but 12Mb/s is about 8x burn speed, or at least 4x is possible and that takes me 15 min for 4.7 Gb to burn.
Theoretically, yes, it can reach 12Mbps, if the port is not shared and so... And we still don't know if, like Rotary says, the 5-6 hours means converting+burning time.
If he was running an external DVD drive via USB1 connection, it did take 3 hours + to rip and burn a DVD, I know because I just finished doing it. Took almost 92 minutes to rip, and 95 minutes to burn it. The burner was set to burn at 8X but never got up to speed. THe same burner running via USB2 connection will run at the same speed as the internal EIDE drives, so his problem may be the USB1 connection and a very slow data transfer rate. If you have a desktop tower with a free PCI port, I'd recommend purchasing a USB2.0 card to put in. www.newegg.com and www.surpluscomputers.com are two places I've seen then reasonably priced.
It took 6 minutes, 34 seconds to burn hooked up to the USB 2.0 hub. Drop the USB 1.0 and get the faster USB 2.0, can't go wrong with it.
using a single core CPU YES it will cause problems using a dual-core CPU it won't cause problems you need plenty of memory also ,at least 2 gig
sorry guys. i had no idea people were waiting for info from me. like i said i'm a noob so a lot of the stuff you guys mentioned just went right over my head. but what i can list is comp specs. i'm running an external burner and it takes the stated amount of time to JUST burn. converting takes long as well so it's like i spend most of the day just burning 1 dvd. it's even more disappointing when there's a "burn failed" message at the end. BTW what do you guys do with your "failed burns" dvds? do you throw them away or recycle them? i haven't done the DMA thing yet but will as soon as i can. it's funny how i was mainly asking about multitasking but most people seem interested in my speed problem (not that i mind). so from what i've read multitasking WILL cause problems. is there any way around it? anyway this is my comp info: microsoft xp home intel pentium 4; CPU 1.70 GHz; 256 MB ram
You do not have enough ram.. XP uses 200 of that just putting up a desktop.. No wonder it's slow. It's probably shifting the IO data through the pagefile after the burning apps have taken another 70 or so.
