Max DVD burning speed with an G3 iMac 600Mhz?

[Falcon500]

I have an 8x speed DVD writer hooked up to my iMac in an external Firewire case. When I go to burn at 8x speed the buffer underun protection kicks in constantly. The max speed I can get from the burner without the buffer underrun protection kicking in is 6x.

Is this the limit of the IDE hard drive and CPU?

[deadsierra]

Is this the limit of the IDE hard drive

Nope. Well, probably not. I assume its a 7200 RPM drive, but even if its not, it should be speedy enough to handle it. IDE is not a limiting factor in hard disks, as of yet, and I assume that even a 5400 drive would be able to keep an 8X burner fed.

and CPU?

Probably.

I would have thought that your computer would be strong enough to handle it, but I suppose that burning at 8X requires a fair amount of horsepower.

Check the process view the next time you burn a disk. If it keeps redlining, then your processor is at fault.

[Falcon500]

It does have a 7200 rpm hard drive. I think the specs on the IDE bus are only 66Mbps instead of the newer 100 and 133 speeds of newer macs...

[Falcon500]

I just checked Activity Monitor and found Toast 6.05 to be the culprit. When I run Toast 6.03 I still have head room. Even when reading a DVD (to copy it) Toast seems to max out the processor in version 6.05. Has anyone else found Toast 6.05 to use more processing power than previous versions? If not perhaps I should download the latest version again to see if that helps..

[miksu]

600MHz is definitely enough for 8X speed. I''m using 450MHz G4 and for burning purposes (8x), 600MHz G3 has more horsepower than 450MHz G4, encoding MPEG2 is another story, because G3 lacks AltiVec.

You could try something other software, Discribe for example. It's easy to use and demo lets you burn five disks. If you want to buy it, it's cheap. Or Missing Media Burner, Firestarter, etc (free).