burning two DVDs at once

[briansmccabe]

Hi -

I have two brand new dvd burners and they both haul ass, but I want to write to them at the same time. The only burning program I have that is worth a damn is tmpgenc dvd author but I cannot figure out how to get two simultaneous occurences of this app to run. If there is no way to do it, can someone suggest another additional burning app i can buy that is cheap (50 bucks or less) and good?

[steve2713]

Nero will do it.

[briansmccabe]

the lameass version of nero that came with my dvd burners (they are both the same model etc) only writes a "mini-DVD" whatever the hell that is. it only accepts CDR media for that format!! So basically the version of nero that comes with my new drives doesn't write dvds. I know you're referring to the complete nero package, right? any other apps?

[BJ_M]

prassi (recordnow max) also wil do it .., besides nero

[briansmccabe]

do you use this product? is it good? thanks for the suggestion.

[BJ_M]

i use prassi a lot -- burned several 10,00's of disks with it ..

[mattyboy]

dvd decrypter can have 2 instances running at once as well. But DVDShrink, Im not sure about, sorry.

[steve2713]

I've had 4 instances of DVD Shrink running at once, of course DVD Shrink doesn't burn DVDs so it doesn't matter

I've never tried running DVD Decrypter twice at once though to burn to discs at once, I'll have to try that if I get really bored :P

[bazooka]

Hi -

I have two brand new dvd burners and they both haul ass, but I want to write to them at the same time. The only burning program I have that is worth a damn is tmpgenc dvd author but I cannot figure out how to get two simultaneous occurences of this app to run. If there is no way to do it, can someone suggest another additional burning app i can buy that is cheap (50 bucks or less) and good?

I hope it is the same movie that you are wanting to burn.

If not, then you would seriously be taxing your systems resources.

[briansmccabe]

If burning the same content to two different discs is the only way to burn two dvds simultaneously, then so be it. I make tons of copies of things for clients so that would not be a hinderance.

However, I don't know that i agree with the notion that burning different content would rape my system resources. I work with people that do it with no known problems. Currently my only hurdle is getting an app that can do it.

DVD Decrpypter can be used as a burning app???? I never noticed that.

[steve2713]

DVD Decrpypter can be used as a burning app????

It's only the best.... (IMO of course)

[briansmccabe]

So, getting back to the original question, do you suppose if I ran tmpgenc dvd author for one drive and dvd decrypter for another, I'd be alright? I guess I'll give it a shot. thanks everyone

[steve2713]

That's alot of data to be moving at once, you might have the burners having to slow down at higher burn speeds, which would then defeat the purpose of burning two at once. Good luck and let us know how it works though, and what you got to work (burn speed, different content to each disc, etc.)

[bazooka]

However, I don't know that i agree with the notion that burning different content would rape my system resources.

Whatever

[briansmccabe]

very thoughtful reply.

Evidently DVD Decrypter only burns images and not VIDEO_TS directories so apparently I am back to square one.

[steve2713]

You could run the files through DVD Shrink and have it back up as an ISO image, if you wanted an ISO image to work with. Of course there are other ways as well, although Shrink is an easy way of doing it if you already have it on your computer.

[steve2713]

BTW, I'm going to have to agree with Bazooka about strain that burning multiple content will have on your system, as I said before that's alot of data to be moving at once. But give it a try, you're not going to know until you've tried it. I'd personally think that above 4x burn speed would REALLY be pushing your luck, so doing multiple burns at once will have little advantage (unless of course you were planning on burning at slower speeds anyway).

[briansmccabe]

well, both new drives are 16x but all I generally buy is 8x media so I'm writing at 8x. I will try it and see how it goes; if it is in fact extremely taxing I will just burn the same content at once. I was only basing my opinion on the claims workplace buddies have made, perhaps I misinterpreted what they said, or they were stating they had accomplished something they had in fact not. We're a pretty tight-knit group and it is a techie team (web development) I work on so there's not a lot of BS that anyone gets away with, but we'll see. Thanks for the suggestions.

[steve2713]

I should have mentioned, if you had multiple IDE controller cards installed on seperate hard drives with the content on different hard drives, etc. it'd probably entirely possible. But with the type of configuration that most peoples' computers are at, your chances are not good I'd say.

[briansmccabe]

I've got two internal hard drives, each of which is a master on its own IDE chain with the burners acting as slaves on each chain. The content I was going to test with in a minute is both on the same drive though. I guess we'll see. As soon as TMPGENC DVD author finishes kicking out this ISO file I will give it a whirl and report how it went.

How do you suppose having one disc's content on an internal hard drive and the other disc's content on an external drive would work? i'm guessing that would be even more taxing than the original scenario.

[briansmccabe]

well, here's what I found in testing the idea of writing to two DVD+R drives simultaneously.

first scenario: different DVD+Rs, different content
---------------------------------------------------------
Drive A data: ~2.2GB
time it took: 7:41
avg speed: 4.0x

Drive B data: ~3.1GB
time it took: 10:18
avg speed: 4.0x

second scenario: different DVD+Rs, same data
------------------------------------------------------
Drive A and B data: 2.2GB
time it took: 4:17 (both drives)
peak speed: 8.0x (both drives)
avg speed: ~7.3x (both drives)

So clearly, burning the same data to two discs simultaneously is far more efficient than burning different sets of data to two drives simultaneously, so much so that burning different sets of data to different drives consumes roughly the same amount of time as it would take to just burn one disc and then the next all in the same drive.

However, I certainly would not go so far as to say that burning different sets of data to two drives simultaneously was seriously taxing my system resources. In fact, throughout the experiment I had the Windows Task Manager open with the resources tab selected, so there was that little black and neon-green gauge in the system tray. At no point in time did the gauge rise above 25% area. The system seemed to handle the workload just fine.

Overall, I think I'll stick to writing the same data to the different drives though. thanks everyone for your input.

[steve2713]

Looks like my 4x guesstimate was way off... :P

As far as the strain on your system, I didn't expect your CPU to be an issue as you pointed out, the issue is that you can only transfer so much data at once, like I said that's alot of data to be moving at once, but it's good to know that you had 'some' success. If the burn quality did not suffer then at least you'll be able to burn to discs of the same content well enough.

[bazooka]

The ram is what I was thinking about, since the drives use direct memory access.