What can do whilst burning a DVD??

[Fozzee]

Hi

Is it safe to author one DVD whilst burning a different one??

I've just bought a DVD Writer and I was wondering what I could do on my PC whilst it was burning. I assume surfing the net is pretty safe?

(See my profile for my specs)

Cheers

Fozzee

[Hardcoreruss]

Net yes, I would not do anyhting that requred a lot of processing power like editing, converting etc...

For the sake of 15-20 mins and not receiving a coaster I would wait.

[freestyler]

I second that, as a matter of fact, I give that a toast - yes, a toast to burning. Cheers!

[bugster]

Personally I am happy to do almost anything whilst burning, including encoding. About the only things that I avoid are thos that generate huge amounts of disk activity. This includes having an authoring program generate a titleset or disk image, unzipping large archives etc.... Actually editing menus and such in an authoring program is not a problem.

[TBoneit]

Edit: I agree with bugster who posted while I was writing this.

It depends, I do authoring while burning, I surf the net, I read Newsgroups, if I run winrar then I keep an eye on the drive buffer percentage. I convert short clips with TMPGenc, upto 2 to 3 long minute clip). I usually have the Authoring program sitting there in the tray along with DVDPatcher, Newsbin, IE 6, and a couple of folders open all sitting there in the tray whilest I burn. Sony DRU 500a here, so the 8Mb Buffer may be helping and of course buffer under-run protection needs to be on, I use Nero myself.

As far as I can see the burn process itself is low cpu usage.

So I do all these myself, not at the same time of course, while I am burning at 4X speed. No coasters from doing so yet. My last coaster was last week from a power outage, can't win them all, previous coaster was months before when I forgot what I was doing and cancelled the burn after it had started burning.

Nero itself will take over when writing the leadin and leadout to prevent problems. By that I mean when it is burning the leadin or leadout, it will prevent me from opening folders or changing directories and such til it starts the actual burn. I suspect/believe that is because buffer underrun isn't applicable whele doing that part of the burn.

YMMV
Roger T

[crumpetman]

Pretty much anything exluding playing games which doesn't matter as I'm not a gamer anyway. I'll burn and rip at the same time, or burn and run dvd2one. I don't find it makes any difference to the burning, it's the other app which runs slower.

[andkiich]

I know this is not an option for everyone, but I have a separate machine just for DVD stuff, and one for everything else.

Over the course of a few months and a little scrimping and saving here and there, just about anyone should be able to put together another low end machine. Save some extra money on keyboard/mouse/ speakers and such by getting a KVM switch.

Just another option for those curious.