DVD writing speed

[DrAlanStatham]

Hi,

Apologies if this has been asked before, I'm completely new to this and haven't managed to find an answer elsewhere on the boards.

My problem is that I managed to copy a dvd the other day onto a blank 4.7 GB disk and it came out fairly ok, but in parts it stalls on playback and the sound doesn't always match up.

I now want to move on and back up some of my other films onto 8.5 GB dual layer disks and want to try and get the copy quality better. My copying software (Nero Expres) offers me different writing speeds.

Am I right in thinking that if I reduce the writing speed the quality of the copy is likely to be better?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Dr Alan

[redwudz]

If you are backing up a commercial disc to DL, don't use Nero. It doesn't do DL very well. Instead, use only Verbatim DL+ discs, DVDFab HD Decrypter to rip to your hard drive and ImgBurn to burn. Any other brand of disc or burning software may cause you problems with DL backups. In fact I would leave Nero out of most any DVD backup procedure. If you backup to a DVD-5, Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden discs are two of the best. Then use DVDFab HD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, main movie only, and ImgBurn to burn the disc.

For burning speed, I usually drop down one speed from the rated disc speed, IE, 16X burned at 12X. But reducing the burning speed is not necessarily going to give you a better burn. That depends on the media and the writer. Trying to burn 16X media at 2X, for example, may give you a much worse burn.

JMO,

And welcome to our forums.

[Brent.M]

I don't know about anyone else but I burn at the certified speed. If it says 16X I'll burn at 16X, If it says 4X I'll burn at 4X. I've only ever used Verbatim disks.

[DrAlanStatham]

Thanks very much for the comprehensive reply redwudz, you've saved me masses of time.

On reflection, I guess I should have tried to figure it out myself from the information here.

Speaking as a novice, it will certainly take me a while to find my way round. There's much more to this than I originally thought.

For now, I've downloaded DVDFab and ImgBurn and await my supply of discs ordered by post to test them out. I've actually ordered Philips discs for the moment, but will switch to Verbatim once I've used them up. Just as an experiment, I'll try it with Nero as well to compare the quality and follow your advice on the burn speed.

Will let you know what I think of the Philips discs.

Thanks again for your help, hope the sun is shining in CA.

Dr A

[Ollie6431]

...use DVDFab HD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, main movie only, and ImgBurn to burn the disc...

For some reason when I tried to use ImgBurn to burn the disk directly from VIDEO_TS folder, the burning step failed. If I used ImgBurn to create an ISO file from VIDEO_TS then burn the ISO file to the disk, it worked fine. Do you have any suggestion on what may be the problem? Thanks