Burning a DVD with other tasks running in the background

[alegator]

I was wondering if I am safe burning a DVD video to DVD-R with Nero Burning ROM while other tasks are running in the background (Norton Antivirus, Firewall, MSN Messenger, Messenger Plus, PestPatrol, and P2P programs). I tried it with a DVD+RW and things went ok. When I burn to DVD-R I close all other programs and tasks and I dedicate the PC to the burning process, but since burning takes 1 hour per DVD (1X), I would really like to do all things simultaneously so not to lose so much time. Am I safe? Thanks for your feedback.

[Capmaster]

Should be OK if your burner has buffer underrun protection, and most do nowadays

[thor300]

I try to avoid running harddisk intensive programs while burning, for example Pulldown.exe, DVD Author programs and Imgtools. CPU intensive programs are OK to run while burning, for example CCE and besweet and so on, just set the task priorities to Low or BelowNormal, especially for CCE thats important.

[jaxxboss]

alegator, I think that you should dedicate all your resources to finding a better paying job so you can buy a faster dvd writer. At least faster than 1x, because.....DAMN.

[johns0]

jaxxboss,if you read his stats you would see he has a new burner,its the dvd blanks that are 1x,maybe a firmware update will burn faster unless the blanks are true 1x only.

[alegator]

Yes the burner has buffer underrun protection and also I have 2Gb RAM, so I guess I'm fine then.
Jaxxbox, the burner is not the problem (it's a Sony DRU500A), the DVD's are 1X (I bought 100 of them long time ago at bargain price).
Thanks all for their views.
Regards.

[Richard_G]

I always burn at 4x in Nero 5.5 and just use the pc while I'm doing it. I tend to only use it for email and surfing (just to kill the 15 minutes or so it takes to burn), but I've never had a failed burn no matter what I've been doing.

[alegator]

Richard, what a pleasure must be to burn at 4X! The fastest I burned were DVD+RW's at 2.4X, and the 1X DVD-R's take 1 hour to burn, I bought a 100 splindle at bargain price.
I already burned 6DVD's with Nero and also checking mail, chatting on MSN and surfing the web, with some other tasks in the background (NIS, P2P programs, etc) without any trouble.
By the way, when burning with Nero, do you use the Data Verification option at the end?

[Richard_G]

No, I don't use the data verification option. I'm not even sure I know what it does (verifies the data I suppose?). I use Ritek G04 DVD-R disks and always burn at 4x. Sometimes from an iso image (if it's a project that I may need more than one copy of), other times using the DVD Video preset and filling the VIDEO_TS folder with the vob, bup and ifo files. So far I've not had a single duff disk out of over 200.

One 3 hour project I did required 26 copies on DVD and a further 40 on VHS tape. Using the TV output on my AIW card connected to the video recorder I could produce the VHS copies, but these had to be done in real time. While that was going on, I was able to burn the DVDs. I split the project into two halves so I only had 1.5 hours per DVD to keep the quality up, but it still meant I could burn 6 sets of DVDs in the time it took to do one VHS tape!