Question about the buffer seen in Nero

[BigRedDog]

This may be a lame question, but when using Nero, there's a read (write?) buffer bar that usually stays at around 99% (next to the green button). Is it better if that bar stays relatively constant? I had one burn (coaster) in a different computer that fluxtuated btw 15%-99%.

[garryheather]

That's a level indicator for the buffer on the writer - the top one above the progress indicator is the buffer Nero has allocated in RAM.

The one you describe should stay well in the high figures in an ideal world, especially if your recorder does not have some sort of buffer underrun protection. Wildly fluctuating levels mean the PC isn't maintaining a sustainable data rate, usually because the source can't be read quickly enough or the PC is doing something else that is taking its efforts away from burning the disc.

[BigRedDog]

What is the minimum, realistically, CPU requirements? I have an HP 300i, XP1700+ (overclocked to 2200+ but untested for stability - haven't had a chance to), and 512MB ram. I was not doing anything else at the time. Also, the HP burner was connected to an ata controller card, if that makes a difference. And the movie was ripped to HD.

[garryheather]

If the machine is configured properly, for example, UDMA is enabled on IDE devices, you don't need a brute of a machine. Burning applications have a low CPU overhead providing you are only burning (if you're doing "on the fly" encoding of some description like cross fading audio tracks on a CD, then this will obviously increase).

I've got access to a DVD writer that is running quite happily on an early Pentium II carcass and the CPU usage while burning on that only just breaks into double figures. IIRC, that (only) has 512Mb of RAM too, although quite a chunk of that is allocated for application buffering but the drives aren't exactly thrashing either.

In your case I am wondering if your overclocking is the problem. IDE does not support simultaneous read / write operations and using an extra controller card is basically putting an obstacle between that and the PCI bus, which is where the IDE controller is tapped from anyway in most chipsets IIRC. I am considering the fact that overclocking your PC, which can easily involve bumping up the clocking levels on the motherboard as a whole and not just on the processor, is causing instability or packet crashing. Seems odd it only did it the once, though - even a badly fragmented hard disk should cause THAT many problems throughout the course of a burn.

Very odd.

[BigRedDog]

Actually I only burned one disk on that computer and decided to move the burner to another computer (2.6GHz) 'cause I didn't want any more coasters. But afterwards I started thinking about it and thought maybe the overclocking's the problem. I may, when I have sometime, reset the CPU and retest the computer. .