Max burners on a cpu

[fullpipe]

My Greeetings
I'm going to build a jukebox (why are they called that anyway) to burn multiple copies of my homemade Video and I'm wondering how many dvd copies can be burned at the same time? Say it's a 3.06g cpu, about a gig of memory.
Looking around I see 9 bay cases available. What sort of resources does a single burn take up and is that numbered multiplied by the number of burners.
Then I thought Maybe the dvd burners could be external either usb2 or firewire, If external burners are used is the total number of burners determined by the bandwidth available?
Best of all
Bruce

[Capmaster]

My Greeetings
I'm going to build a jukebox (why are they called that anyway) to burn multiple copies of my homemade Video and I'm wondering how many dvd copies can be burned at the same time? Say it's a 3.06g cpu, about a gig of memory.
Looking around I see 9 bay cases available. What sort of resources does a single burn take up and is that numbered multiplied by the number of burners.
Then I thought Maybe the dvd burners could be external either usb2 or firewire, If external burners are used is the total number of burners determined by the bandwidth available?
Best of all
Bruce

8X = ~10.8 MBps = ~90 or 95 Mbps. So it's 95 Mbps per burner, a little more for overhead. Ideally USB2 is 480Mbps, but in actual practice, it's more like half that. So figure 2 burners per dedicated USB2 port. Maybe 3 for firewire, since it's a bit better in practice than USB2

[fullpipe]

thaanks Capmaster
So a Laptop with 3 usbs and one fire could do 7 simultaneous burns?

[ZAPPER]

A quick search for "MULTIPLE BURNERS" returned this https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=239034&highlight=multiple+burners

[fullpipe]

I would like to know what sort of a drain on system resources 7-10 dvd burners draw.
How's the memory situation during the process

[celtic_druid]

You would be better off just buying a 9 target duplicator. They aren't that expensive without the robotics.

[Capmaster]

You would be better off just buying a 9 target duplicator. They aren't that expensive without the robotics.

Agreed. It's not as simple as just hanging a bunch of burners onto your laptop. The numbers I quoted only deal with the burner interfaces. You have other considerations like PCI bus speed (USB and FW interface tt the CPU and memory via this bus), RAM limitations and system overhead, swapfile activity slowing it all down, etc. It's not that simple. When you get into that many burners, you're moving away from what a typical PC can handle, and is designed for.

Do yourself a favor and look into some dupe machines. Check this place, the prices aren't bad:
http://www.runtechmedia.net/

[fullpipe]

Yeah and there are considerations and variables at this end as well . A couple burners on this job, three on that job etc. I don't see why anyone would buy a premade duplicator though, just a case, burners and a controller. a real no brainer to put together.
I'm doing live event videography and what would be way cool for me would be to have duplicator burning 9 dvds live while the action is going on. Yous see there is no time after the event to start editing, encoding a burning a master then duplicationg it. All the buyers will have left goodbye.
What I can currently do is burn straight from camera to one disc thru neodvd. But the software will only let me specify one burner. I'd realy like to burn 10 discs live while the camera is rolling so that at the final whistle, 10 discs would be ready except for finalization.
no can't be dones please
Bruce

[bazooka]

A premade duplicator is made for the purpose of mass duplication(Blatantly Obvious - Hence the title)

I hope your question has been answered fullpipe.

Computers will do a wide variety of things but it does not do things very well because it is a multipurpose machine.

You need a dedicated machine for what you want to do.

[Cobra]

no can't be dones please

If that answer is the correct one, then it is unavoidable.

I think what you will be asking your machine to do is beyond the power of the machine. You cannot ask it to:

- Capture video from a device
- Encode the video to DVD MPEG-2
- Burn onto nine units (even one is pushing it) at once

Machines today can take video from a source (even an analogue one) and put it directly into MPEG-2 with little trouble. The quality won't be perfect, but it is possible. However - as Capmaster says - your machine simply doesn't have the resources in order to operate that number of burners at once. Further to that, I am not sure that the software even exists that will take video, capture and encode it then burn it in real time.

Sorry, but the outlook isn't good. Possibly the fastest way for you to do this would be to use a standalone DVD recorder to capture the video direct from the camera (through SCART or S-Video), then duplicate that DVD quickly. If people want it, I'm sure they'd hang on ten minutes. I would.

Anyway, best of luck. If you do find a way and it works then let us know!

Cobra

[fullpipe]

Thanks Cobra
But you see I'm more than half way there because both windvd creator and neodvd (cheap ) permit capturing, encoding and burning at once to dvd ie realtime. Doesn't seem to tie up the machine unduly. HDDless standalones accomplish this as well and I'm sure there's minimal horsepower involved there.
In fact I see doubling up on the front end requirements as well. Would like to have two or more cameras from which to choose Not capture from 2 or 3 cameras but select which camera is captured then when desired, select video stream from camera 2 to be captured.
can you really ask too much from a machine?
Bruce

[Cobra]

I wasn't aware of any software that can do this, but you learn something new every day.

Basically all you have to worry about is persuading a PC to burn with multiple drives. I don't know enough to help you out - sorry.

Good luck,

Cobra

[bazooka]

can you really ask too much from a machine?

Yep

[fullpipe]

Cobra
Don't apologize no sweat. It's all in the rap. who knows where it might lead
Cheers
Bruce

[fullpipe]

Thank you everyone for your considered input on this topic.
this post is not so mush a please help me but rather an attempt to generate a discussion which will help push the envelope in this particular area.
Padus makes a fine piece of software called discjuggler which will burn dvds and can be licenced for an unlimited number of drives. Now what is meant by unlimited. It's a matter of finesse I think, subtle things in the way the drives are daisy chained or not, whether the camera is firewired to the burners or elsewhere. Short quick answers need not apply
Best of everything
Bruce

[celtic_druid]

Just burn your master on the fly, then run it through a 9 target duplicator. Only a few extra minutes. With DiscJuggler you can't burn the video on the fly. You would need to capture and then burn.

[fullpipe]

Using a 3.06 laptop and nearly a gig of ram with a nec3500 external usb dvd burner , a digital8 sony firewired to the onboard firewire port on the laptop and using neodvd6 running under xpHome sp2,, I can capture, encode and burn a dvd realtime amazingly only using 43-55% of the cpu and 30 percent of the memory., I need to capture 1.5hours on one dvd so I'm using the 'better' which gives me a resolution of 352 x 480 (odd size, but its 780 when played back.. gotta figure that one out). The machine is not maxed out and could certainly burn more discs at the same time if I could only figure out how to tell neodvd to burn them along with the one which it willingly burns.
Any you good folks still there?
Bruce

[Tidy]

If I may make a suggestion, take the answers people give you and stop giving them directions on how to answer you and which answers are acceptable and which are not. It IS free help and if you don't like the answer don't read it. I am not trying to be inflamatory, I just don't think it is a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth so to speak

[celtic_druid]

Well the way to tell neodvd would be to ask the developers for the feature. But if they won't add it then that is kind of it.

[gmatov]

I THINK people are going at this wrong.

Nero allows use of multiple burners, and I don't think it takes more CPU usage for 2 than 1. It is merely data transfer.

If you hook 6 or 12 burners to the machine, and it is sending the SAME data to them all, I see no problem, particularly with buffering, should you be on the same IDE cable with pairs of them, ie, IRQ will allow send to one, to fill buffer, send to the other while that one burns, etc.

Probably better to go with multiport USB 2.0.

I CAN see a snakepit with 12 USB wires and 12 powerbrick wires, along with all your other wires, unless you put them all in some type of dedicated enclosure, from a cardboard box up.

Cheers,

George

I've only tried with 2 units at once, an NEC USB and LiteOn IDE, but no prob, so far.

[fullpipe]

Tidy thank you for your input. It is just that we are seeing a new type of spam like activity on the net and that is the forum busy body or know it all who feel it necessary to put their two cents in whether they know dick about the topic . For some reason they set themselves up as 'experts' and really just hog bandwidth.
So I apologize for attempting to qualify respondents but you see all those unnecessary self flattering and ego boosting posts discourage bonafide respondents from giving what might turn out to be the answer.
See where gmatov actually has pertinent information on the topic. Very usfull Thanks gmotov, I'm going to think about what you've said..
Bruce

[jimmalenko]

It is just that we are seeing a new type of spam like activity on the net and that is the forum busy body or know it all who feel it necessary to put their two cents in whether they know dick about the topic . For some reason they set themselves up as 'experts' and really just hog bandwidth.
So I apologize for attempting to qualify respondents but you see all those unnecessary self flattering and ego boosting posts discourage bonafide respondents from giving what might turn out to be the answer.

You can't choose your family, and similarly you can't choose who responds to you on an internet forum. However, you can choose who you listen to and who you ignore

Anyway ... (hopefully I'm not hogging bandwidth here )

I've got 2 CD burners on the same IDE and have tried Nero's multiple burner capability a couple of times. IIRC, when burning off the hard drive, it took a fraction longer than the time to burn the 2 CDs separately. One would assume it would act similarly with DVDs, and one would also assume that you would not be limited to 2 burners, either. I guess we'd be looking at extra PCI IDE cards, but I'm not sure on the specifics of transfer speeds using these as opposed to devices on the "standard" IDE ports. I would've thought though that PCI IDE cards would be quicker than USB or firewire, but I could be wrong.

[fullpipe]

Hi Jimmalenko. The senario calls for multiple burning to take place real time with the capture. To review, we've got the capture,encoding and burning of 1dvd all happening at the same time with system resources to spare. the requested operation is to add burners, writing at the same time and from the same capture sso that there will be several dvd finalized about the time capture ends.
If the addititional burners were somehow slaved or mimicked to the burner that neodvd is burning to.
Bruce

[Cobra]

I wonder if there is any hardware out there that will take a single IDE signal and split it off to many drives. The PC would see only one drive but it would be sending to many. Maybe that's over-simplified, though.

Would it be possible to make one if it doesn't exist?

[fullpipe]

I wonder if there is any hardware out there that will take a single IDE signal and split it off to many drives. The PC would see only one drive but it would be sending to many. Maybe that's over-simplified, though.

Would it be possible to make one if it doesn't exist?

Do you suppose a firewire hub? Will the pc see only the hub

[Tidy]

Tidy thank you for your input. It is just that we are seeing a new type of spam like activity on the net and that is the forum busy body or know it all who feel it necessary to put their two cents in whether they know dick about the topic . For some reason they set themselves up as 'experts' and really just hog bandwidth.
So I apologize for attempting to qualify respondents but you see all those unnecessary self flattering and ego boosting posts discourage bonafide respondents from giving what might turn out to be the answer.
See where gmatov actually has pertinent information on the topic. Very usfull Thanks gmotov, I'm going to think about what you've said..
Bruce

Understood, no apology necessary

[Tidy]

Don't those multi burner duplicator boxes use just one USB connection? i would think they make one with a kind of "backplane" in it which should send the stream to all drives. I could be wrong though.

[fullpipe]

I've been looking into the duplicators and the ones I've sourced on the net arn't computers really. There is a controller which fits in one of the bays, burners in the other bays and a power supply. of course the cables. So they don't actually hook up to a pc via usb or firewire. They can only 'duplicate' a disc nothing else.

[Tidy]

I will keep my eye out for what you are looking for.

[monzie]

SCSI would be better than IDE.