Burning time taking 2 hours???

[Its Pink Ninja]

Ok, so first off im going to say that yes my computer burns DVD's. Until recently its been taking me about 2 hours and 30 minutes per video to burn. Me being stupid thought that this was normal. A friend of mine said that was amazingly slow and that his burns in about 10-20 min. So i looked for other programs other than nero. I tried 2 in fact and both said "No DVD disk in drive" which i thought was funny because i had one in and it was working fine with nero. So my questions are,

Is there a way to speed up the burning process by using other programs?
If there is, which ones would you reccomend?
Should my computer be taking this long and is this normal?

Also, the two programs im using are: "DVD-Cloner IV" and "1Click DVD Copy 5"
Thanks for your time
-Mike

[redwudz]

Just to be clear, 'burning' is the final process of creating the DVD. The programs used don't have much to do with the burning speed, except for setting it in some cases. Even a 1X burn wouldn't take 2 hours. Most 16X media can be burned in less than 10 minutes.

But instead of just burning, if you are encoding, or transcoding the video to a different format or a different size, that can takes quite a while, depending on the speed of your computer, the length of the video and it's type and specifications.

ImgBurn is a DVD burning program that works quite well. Better than Nero, IMO. But it only burns, nothing else.
The others you mentioned, including Nero can do other processes with the video besides burning.

But if your burner itself is slow, it may have reverted to PIO mode:

To check DMA/PIO mode within Windows:

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

From there, right click on one of the channels and choose 'Properties>Advanced Settings'. All drives should be DMA mode. The 'Current Transfer Mode' for Hard drives is usually DMA 4-6 and DVD burners DMA 2-4, DVD ROMs usually DMA 2. If you see any in PIO mode, that can slow things down.

Changing them back may be easy or complicated. First see if you can change them in that window. If not, I usually uninstall the channel the drive is on and let the OS reinstall it. This will usually take a reboot. This will not damage any files on the computer.

From there, if no luck, get back to us.

And welcome to our forums.

[Its Pink Ninja]

Thanks, good to be here.

The burner I use is the one built into my ACER laptop. All the specks and whatnot i have in my computer info thing.

Well im talking about putting (mostly .AVI) vids around 700 MB onto a DVD, Im not sure if its called "burning or transcoding" but thats what I "attempt" to do.

Man you guys are going to have a lot of fun answering and helping me

So i guess you can make video CD's - VCD's. So the CD holds 700 MB. The video is 699 MB. I drag the video into Nero and the video goes so far off the chart in size i can no longer see it (past 1 gig) is this normal?

I'm guessing there is nothing i can really do to increase the speed of my burner and taking 2 hours is just not going to work for me. Are there any companies or brands that you would recommend to me? because I'm thinking about just buying an external burner. I also have a Fry's in my area and many of you might have heard of it. Its a huge electronic store, do you guys have any specific burner that you have or used and is good? I'm sure Fry's has it.

[Its Pink Ninja]

Umm can anyone please help!!

yes this is a bump

[thecrock]

You are transcoding with nero, this is preparing the .avi file for playing back on a dvd player. Nero is converting the .avi file to .vob which is the standard for dvd. This is a heavy procedure and is normal to take two or three hours depending on how fast your pc is.

If your dvd player can handle divx which is what i'm guessing your source file is then burn directly to a cd/dvd. If not then I'm afraid your stuck with a two hour processing time, sorry.

[Its Pink Ninja]

well what about the part where i drag the 699 MB file into nero and it goes so far off the size chart i can no longer see it?
(it goes past 1 gig)

[AlanHK]

well what about the part where i drag the 699 MB file into nero and it goes so far off the size chart i can no longer see it?
(it goes past 1 gig)

Because it's telling you how big the DVD video (basically, MPEG2) files will be.

If your DVD player can play DIVX files, you should try making a DATA disk and just copying the files, not converting them to DVD video. That will be much faster.

[redwudz]

That's kind of what I suspected. The burning part of your conversion probably takes about the same as your friends, maybe 10-20 minutes, depending on the media and speed selected. The conversion part probably takes the two hours or so, which is actually fairly fast if you are converting a 700MB Xvid to something that will play on a set top DVD player.

Nero is probably trying to convert to a DVD which would be up to 4.37GB in size. An external burner won't help much for speed, but might save some wear on your laptop drive. Getting a set top Divx player would definitely be the easy way to go. Not all net videos are compatible, but even if you need to modify them, it will usually not take too long.

[Its Pink Ninja]

well i downloaded "Adensoft Audio/Data CD Burner" and the videos work perfect for my DVD player.

So what i'm guessing is that Nero was converting the .AVI movie files into another type of file which was compatible with pretty much all DVD players and the file type that it converts it into is just huge?

When i made the data disk it took me about 5 min.
Thanks for helping i really appreciate it.