What determines ripping speeds?

[bombart]

Hello Guys. I'm determined to make mi ripping time an absolute minimum. So I'm trying to find out what it takes to improve your rip speeds. This is what I know so far.

1) DRIVE - Some drives are locked at 2X... other's aren't. I bought a Lite-On Ltd-166 and upgraded to the latest firmware (which then renamed my drive to something like XJ-166??)

2) DVD - The DVD you're ripping makes a difference. Some DVDs rip faster than others. DVD-9 is generally slower than DVD-5.

3) FIRMWARE - Latest firmware is needed to get better rip speeds.

4) DMA vs PIO - DMA is obviously faster... make sure it's enabled if your comp. supports it.

Now, my questions are,

1) Why are people with the same drive and firmware getting such different speeds? I've read about people getting 10X with the Lite-On Ltd-166... others not as lucky. Obviously, no.2 above comes into play. So what DVD were you guys ripping to get these speeds. (I'll try the same DVD and see if I get close to that speed.

Are there any OTHER reasons why people get so many different speeds? I’d really love to find this out. I went out and bought the hardware… small improvement (avg. 4X rips compared to my 2X rips with my Pioneer DVR 105).

Does aspi have anything to do with this? (Newest version works better)

Does my harddrive have anything to do with this? Would any 7200 rpm drive be able to handle a 10X rip?

I’m sure there are a lot of people who would really benefit from this info. so please POST AWAY YOU’RE KNOWLEDGE!!!

Cheers.

B.

[Terra]

Well, You got most of the obvious but mostly I would say the drive makes the difference. But also the aspi version, the way it is removing macrovision and the speed of your comp. Hope that helps!

[nufan292]

There is also the type of controller that your motherboard uses, and what motherboard you have. All controllers are not created equal.

[bombart]

Nufan292 & Terra: Thanks for your replies... one for confirming and one for introducing another factor, one that I didn't think about and don't know how I didn't consider. Yes, the motherboard would make a huge difference. That brings me to another question:

1) Is there an advantage to connect my harddrives/dvd drives to RAID controllers as opposed to the regular IDE? Will I get better rip speeds if I do that? If so, how do I know if my harddrives/dvd drives are compatible with RAID?

Thanks a lot.

B.

[Jolard]

Ok, this is going to sound very strange, but I haven't seen anyone else talk about this. I use DVDDecryptor. Usually the ripping speed is pretty constant. However, sometimes, if start up DVDDecryptor while my DVD is playing in the drive using my software DVD player, and then I close the software DVD player and let DVDDecryptor pick it up, it runs incredibly faster (2X to 10X).

I have no idea why this occurs, and I can't get it to work every time, but three times it has and the entire disk has decrypted in far less time.

I am ready for the flames, and the incredulity, but I swear it works. (sometimes)

My theory is that the fact that the software dvd player is already accessing the disk tricks DVDDecryptor into access faster. The only reason I can think of that may cause this, is that DVDDecryptor no longer has to decrypt. I know that DVDxCopy does this kind of thing, it intercepts the stream after the software player has already decoded it, that is the argument they use that protects them, because they are not decrypting the stream. My guess is that DVDDecryptor is intercepting the stream after the player has already unlocked it. Anyway that is the only theory I can think of.

[Gazorgan]

Cache

That's why it's faster, the data has been cached. You can stop and restart DVDDecryptor and get similiar results. It falls apart on DVD9's, sinc eon average the cache won't affect a 6GB rip ( you don't have that much RAM)

[bombart]

Jolard: That's interesting. I have to try it. Although, as Gazorgan said, it falls apart when using DVD9s. I'll still give it a shot though

Does the fact that the disc is already spinning at a high rate have anything to do with it?? The reason I ask this is because my decrypting gradually gets faster. It starts at like 2.4X and the slowly but surely gets to like 5-6X (with a lot of fluctuating). Why does this happen? Same sorta reasoning for using PowerDVD and the DVD Decrypter, in my mind. Am I way off??

B.

[GandyMan]

Hello Guys. I'm determined to make mi ripping time an absolute minimum. So I'm trying to find out what it takes to improve your rip speeds. This is what I know so far.

1) DRIVE - Some drives are locked at 2X... other's aren't. I bought a Lite-On Ltd-166 and upgraded to the latest firmware (which then renamed my drive to something like XJ-166??)

2) DVD - The DVD you're ripping makes a difference. Some DVDs rip faster than others. DVD-9 is generally slower than DVD-5.

3) FIRMWARE - Latest firmware is needed to get better rip speeds.

4) DMA vs PIO - DMA is obviously faster... make sure it's enabled if your comp. supports it.

Now, my questions are,

1) Why are people with the same drive and firmware getting such different speeds? I've read about people getting 10X with the Lite-On Ltd-166... others not as lucky. Obviously, no.2 above comes into play. So what DVD were you guys ripping to get these speeds. (I'll try the same DVD and see if I get close to that speed.

Are there any OTHER reasons why people get so many different speeds? I’d really love to find this out. I went out and bought the hardware… small improvement (avg. 4X rips compared to my 2X rips with my Pioneer DVR 105).

Does aspi have anything to do with this? (Newest version works better)

Does my harddrive have anything to do with this? Would any 7200 rpm drive be able to handle a 10X rip?

I’m sure there are a lot of people who would really benefit from this info. so please POST AWAY YOU’RE KNOWLEDGE!!!

Cheers.

B.

Things I have experianced that effect rip speed, Software loaded on your system. I was working on a friends Liteon 166 (the best in my opinion) we could not rip faster than 2.1, was windows 2000 sp3, My windows SP3 no problem, well same Motherboard, Vopechill setup as mine, so I decided to just load XP on a diff partition and nothing else just the rip software and Power DVD, andway as soon as we tried on it he was gettinthe same as me around 4.0 to 8.5 on dual layer disk. Have not went back and checked to see what the software was that was screwing with it. But just wanted to share my experiance with a liteon 166

[dreadogg]

At least two Ide ports drive & drive seperate, DMA , atleast 7200 RPM HD, dont know if ram would play part? Biggest is the type of DVD. I own a lite-on and I have hit 16 x on many occasions and my pc is AMD 1.33 Thunderbird KT266 Pro 7200 RPM (IBM) Crucial 512 Pc2100 DDR, its kinda outdated I am ripping with lite-on 16 X drive.

[SaSi]

First of all, don't fall in the trap to spend more time in finding out how to save less in ripping. :P

Having said that, ripping at X10 means a transfer rate of 15 Mbps. Unless you have a modern, fast and UltraDMA 100 or 133 disk, don't expect to reach this figures. And even if your drive is as above, it must be de-fragmented for it to be able to sustain such transfer rates.

Ripping, demuxing, encoding, remuxing, deleting, copying and the stuff can make your drive very very fragmented. This adds seek time to write time and overall efficiency goes down the sink.

I have a Pioneer 116 DVD-ROM and have never updated the firmware. It rips DVD-5 disks faster than DVD-9 disks and rips unlocked disks faster than locked ones. The difference can be between X6 for a dual layer locked disk to X15 for a single layer unlocked disk. (rips done a few minutes ago. 7.5 GB Xfiles Season 1, disk 5 took 17 minutes. 4GB Little shop of horror - original version - took 4:38 minutes).

Also, remember to wipe clean the DVD - never use alcohol but sometimes you need to use soap and water. Wipe it dry afterwards. This can also make a difference...

[bombart]

SaSi: Thanks for your advice. I do have UltraDMA 100 drives. The defragmenting aspect of it... yes... I haven't defragged that drive in like 3 days(but done a tonne of ripping and editing, etc on it. So, I'll defrag it more regularly. Cheers.

dreadogg: Thanks for your input. I do have "At least two Ide ports drive & drive seperate, DMA , atleast 7200 RPM HD"... but like I mentioned earlier, I have to defrag them.

GandyMan: Operating System/Software!! Yes, I would think it has a role in the ripping speeds. Thanks.

Cheers All. I have to try these out and post results. In the mean time, please keep the advice coming

B.

[That_Kid]

I have a pioneer 105 and it always rips at 2.1x. One time when ripping a dvd about 8gigs it went up to 6 or 8x. I tried to rip it again but it was stuck at 2.1 again. Is there anyway to just unlock it? Im pretty sure it doesnt have anything to do with my system, there is enough space and it is defragmented. I'm running windows 2000 sp3.

[SaSi]

Many DVD-ROM drives are "locked" into ~2x speed when playing DVD-Video disks because in playing DVD-Video 2x is more than enough (theoretically 1x would be just fine).

Some drives have utility programs that "lock" them (temporarily) to that speed.

You may wonder why? It's because at this speed, (x1.5 ~ x2.1) the drive has enough data rate to play the movie fine, and it doesn't start and stop (sometimes this might cause jerky playback) and because at this reading speed it makes very little noise. (So they say in the readme of some such utilities). I have the DVD-ROM utility for the Pioneer 116 drive. By setting the max speed to 2x I could not rip faster than that flat. By reseting it to MAX or 16x it got back to the normal ripping speed.

BTW I also flashed a new f/w to the drive to make it region free. The f/w version is much newer than the one the drive came with (bought it over a year ago). Contrary to some rumours, the region free f/w didn't reduce ripping speed.

I don't know if a generic program could "unlock" every DVD-ROM drive into it's maximum reading speed (don't know if the "command" to reduce speed is generic in DVD-ROMs).

Anybody with info on that?