DVD Burning and System Performance Issues

mbluett · 03 Jan 2013

I do a lot of DVD burning and hence would prefer the performance of my system to be better when burning DVDs.

I have noticed that when burning DVDs (in particular) that my system becomes less responsive. This appears to be the case regardless of the software I have tried which means there could be a common element that these various apps use. Seems to me in digging into programming a while back that there is a common interface that is used.

Given the slowness of a DVD device, I would have thought that this kind of process would be given a very low priority and hence would allow the system to be more responsive to things like mouse events.

Before anyone asks, my DMA setting is Ultra DMA Mode 2 on the DVD drive. Also, I have 3 SATA HD's and the DVD drive is SATA as well. I do have an IDE CD drive installed. But this is not in use when the sluggishness occurs. The DVD drive is an LG Model GH22NS50.

It seems to me what is happening is that the driver associated with interacting with the hardware is tying up the system. Would this be an accurate assessment?

If this is the case, is there an explanation as to why it must be this way? Or is this just poor or antiquated programming?

Ztruker · 03 Jan 2013

The DVD burn process needs to run at a high priority I would think so the buffers don't go empty, or you end up burning coasters instead of useable DVDs.

Personally, when I burn a CD or DVD, I leave the system alone and don't do anything else until it's done.

centaur78 · 04 Jan 2013

It would be nice if you use this tool to update your profile specs

And a snapshot of the resource monitor or task manager sorting the process by CPU as well one snapshot with RAM... while burning ??? Its helps to know whats running while you are burning..

mbluett · 04 Jan 2013

Ztruker said:

The DVD burn process needs to run at a high priority I would think so the buffers don't go empty, or you end up burning coasters instead of useable DVDs.

Yes, this makes perfect sense especially considering that DVD's are usually created in "Track-at-once" mode.

Thanks very much for the comment.

mbluett · 04 Jan 2013

centaur78 said:

It would be nice if you use this tool to update your profile specs

And a snapshot of the resource monitor or task manager sorting the process by CPU as well one snapshot with RAM... while burning ??? Its helps to know whats running while you are burning..

For what it is worth I updated my specs. But what I was after was not for someone to solve a problem for me but rather to suggest the reason for a condition. That is why I never posted any additional info. This condition is not solvable. It has to do with the nature of the hardware and I would think is inherent in all systems.