Newbie DVD burning help needed.

[billolmesdahl]

I am utterly new to all of this and have some questions. I bought a pioneer a-04 dvd burner and have been having fun backing up my collection of 10 years worth of MST3K episodes. My main question is, how long should it take to burn a disk?

I am using Dazzle DVD creator software to make the disks. Each disk takes around 8 hours to burn! Is this normal? The drive busy light comes on for several minutes, then goes out for an equal amount of time, then back to busy again. This seems insanely slow.

Here are the rest of the details. I am using Windows XP on a system with 256 in ram and a 2.2 gHz cpu. I have everything I can think of in XP turned off and nothing running in the backgroup. The video file is being stored on its own hard disk, which is one big 120 gig NTFS drive.

Any ideas? Any suggestions? I just want to know in small words how to make decent DVDs out of my MST3K episodes from Dapcentral.org and from my own video tapes. If there are better/quicker ways to do this, please let me know.

Thanks,


Bill

[tmcmvd]

if your program has to reencode the video to MPEG II this may take some time...depending ion your system it can be anything between 1 to 20 hours. Use a fast encoder (CCE) or TMPGenc for encoding the MPEGII to DVD compliance and use dvd creator for authoring.

Is DMA selected in the dvd recorder properties ?

[billolmesdahl]

Yeah, DMA has been both turned on and turned off. I've tried it both ways. I'll try encoding it to MP2 with a different program and see if that makes a difference in the burning. Waiting 6 hours for a disc isn't real bad, I was just trying to get some benchmarks to see if I am in the ballpark.

-Bill