Can I do other things while rendering or burning DVD/CD's?

[happydog500]

When I burn or render a CD/DVD, I don't want to do anything on the computer. I think it will cause glitches or something.
The teacher at school serfs the web, and other stuff on the computer while burning CD/DVD's. His generally are not movies, but still, he has no fear of it doing any harm to the burn.

Should I have any concern about doing anything else while, say DVD Shrink is running or burning a DVD?

Why?

Thank you,
Chris.

[Number Six]

It probably is best to let the computer complete it's task before you do anything else - better safe than sorry

I have a dedicated computer just for my video work - no internet, no screen saver, no power management.

[Noahtuck]

I surf and do small things while burning and have never had a problem.

Now i would not encode something at the same time i am burning a dvd or any other heavy drawing process.
On either the CPU or from the other drives, HDD or ROM's.

You could end up with ten lanes of vehicles competing for the same single lane highway 8)

[DereX888]

with 2GB of fastest RDRAM on a Windows 2000 I'm not worry at all... ImgBurn gets 512MB at its disposal while burning, it would have to be really something very CPU/RAM/hdd intensive to disrupt burning. I never burn faster than 8x speed either, very seldom I go for 12x without veryfing - just when I make a 2nd copy only, so accessing my fast hard drives while doing something else is not an issue either.
The only thing I *don't do* while burning is video encoding.

Of course kids don't try this approach on a Vista crapster with less than 10000000GB of RAM and hyper-super-fast hdds

[jagabo]

I often have and encoding running at idle priority while burning DVDs.

[AlanHK]

When I burn or render a CD/DVD, I don't want to do anything on the computer. I think it will cause glitches or something.
The teacher at school serfs the web, and other stuff on the computer while burning CD/DVD's. His generally are not movies, but still, he has no fear of it doing any harm to the burn.

Should I have any concern about doing anything else while, say DVD Shrink is running or burning a DVD?

When burning a disk the data has to stream at a minimum rate. If it slows down too much or stops, you will probably get a coaster.
However, there are safeguards. The burner has a memory cache, or buffer, so if the hard disk stops for a while it can keep burning data from the buffer till the hard disk sends more data.

I use ImgBurn, when it's burning it displays the state of the buffers.

You can keep its window open while it's burning and if you do something disk intensive that takes more than a few seconds, you will see the buffer levels and the speed of burning drop. For instance, if you start copying gigabytes of data, the data going to the burner will slow. If you do see the buffers getting below 50%, abort whatever you were doing or you risk messing up the burn.

But less intensive operations, like browsing normal web pages (not huge image galleries, say) or editing text documents) will not cause any interruption.

However, rendering a video, eg using DVD-Shrink, HCEnc, etc, involves only hard disk operations. It doesn't matter how fast or slow that is, the result will be the same.