Re: Takes forever to burn a DVD - final results

Jeff wrote:
Ray K <raykosXXX@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:465C1C6E.9060703@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Jeff wrote:

<snip>

The source of your problem is right in your first sentence. You
cannot simply burn wma files to a disc to make a DVD. They must
first be transcoded to VOB files that meet certains standards for
frame size and audio/video bit rates. The first 90% of the three
hours was transcoding and the remainder was the actual burning of the
converted files.
Jeff,

You've hit the nail on the head. In following the suggestions of the other guys, I updated my burner firmware, the Roxio suite to 8.05, and
uninstalled the secondary IDE channel. I didn't try the registry
changes to force DMA because I'm not using XP.

(For the record, before uninstalling the IDE channel, the settings for
both devices on both channels were as follows: Device type: Auto Detection (grayed); Transfer Mode: DMA if available; Current Transfer Mode: Ultra DMA (grayed). After rebooting, the secondary channel returned with the Transfer Mode defaulted to PIO only; I set it to DMA
if available.)

I started burning with all the above changes. Still the snail's pace.
As I looked closer at the progress display, I saw that what's taking
so long is an encoding process. So far, it has taken 20 minutes to
encode 7% of the first 20-minute movie. None of the lights on the
burner are on during this phase, so the actual burning probably will
occur at high speed once the encoding finally ends.

While this was going on, I returned to this NG and read Jeff's post. It's clear that's he has identified the real problem.

Now the question becomes, how to speed the conversion to VOB? Are
there specialty programs that could do it faster than what's included
with the Roxio program?

While it's moot at this point, in response to def456 I am using Maxell
4.7GB DVD-R 8X blanks. Dave, the wonderful links you thoughtfully provided are mainly geared to XP, so as noted above I didn't try registry changes.

Thanks to all.

Ray




I regularly use ConvertXtoDVD to transcode full length movies in about an hour. This is with a 2.6 GHz processor so on yours it might be a little longer. The real load on the PC when transcoding is in hard disk I/O so the processor speed doesn't play a big part in the time.


I just completed some timing tests. The project consisted simply of the original two 20-minute wmv files, each about 165 MB, plus a third 20-minute, 165-MB wmv file that completed the series. Start-to-finish time was 5 hours, 44 minutes. The actual DVD burn time was only 8 minutes, which is about 7.5x (60 minutes viewing time burned in 8 minutes), close to the 8x rated speed of the Maxell DVD-R blank. The first 5 hours, 36 minutes were used, in this order: encoding movie 1, then 2, then 3, and finally encoding the menu, which itself took at least 30 minutes.

The 8 minutes to burn the DVD was a mere 2.3 percent of the 344-minute start-to-finish time.

I wonder how fast things would go if I had 6GB of RAM that I could use as an electronic "hard" drive to hold the original wmv files as well as the newly encoded ones.

Thanks, again, to all.

Ray
.

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