@LIGHTNING UK!: question about max RAM buffer size!

[NaN]

Hi!

What bothers me since 4x DVD-burners exist is what's the reason behind small RAM buffers? In Nero you can have 80Mb used for buffering, in your truly great DVDecrypter 128MB.

Thinking that a 8x burner may burn up to 11MBytes per second and that not every Buffer underun protection is really flawless, those 11 seconds seem a bit short to me.

Today it's not seldom to see pcs with 1GB RAM, so I would expect that you could use up to 256 or even 512MB of memory for that purpose (even if I have to manually set to this value).

Is there any reason I missed? Or is there just no demand for that?

Thanks for taking the time! Cheers and have a nice evening, NaN

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Burnproof should be flawless! If it's not, that's something the drive manufacturers need to sort out.

Just for you, I'll make the next one allow upto 256MB, but personally I see no reason for it.

Mine stays on 20 (default) all the time.

[NaN]

Thanks a lot!

AFAIK various technogies of different qualities do exist, like BurnProof, JustLink or SeamlessLinking. I remember that my Plextor 1210 CD-burner had Burn proof of the 1st generation where its precision was just good enough to stay within the cd specs. Their next drive had the 2nd gen and it was quite perfect. Just that many manufacturers didn't want to pay for Burn Proof's licenses and developed their own technologies with at least varying success.

Hey, again a big thank you!

Cheers & by the way good morning, Nan

[NaN]

Hi LIGHTNING UK!

Any idea when the next version will be ready? Tiny hint? Would be great if I could drop my burning software and use yours instead!

By the way: my brand new Pioneer standalone doesn't like dvds where Burnproof had to kick in (drop outs), although I use only high quality media and a Plextor to burn.

Cheers, NaN

[LIGHTNING UK!]

As has been told to you in your post in the burning forum, the buffer isn't going to make much of a difference to burnproof kicking in.

You'd be better off finding the real cause of your underruns and not making them happen.

I've never seen the program buffer (even only set to 20 meg) drop to a dangerous level on a pc that actually works properly.

As for when the next one will be ready... well, when it's finished of course!

[NaN]

Of course ;-))

Thanks for your reply.

Often underruns occur because I do other things at the same time; usually not disc dependend ones, just internet usually. It seems Windows starts swaping after some time of inactivity, so if you left mozilla open some time, reactivate it, windows loads it from the swap file.

This usually kills the burn process. Once I did 2 burns of the same content, 1 had 1 buffer underrun, the other didn't. I got a fat drop out that the other didn't have.

A quality scan of the media (not 100% reliable but should show at least if its roughly ok or not) showed excellent quality. Of course the disc is perfectly readable in my pc's dvd-rom drive.

So I'm looking for big ram buffers (since my 1GB ram allows them anyway)

Cheers & thanks for taking the time! NaN

PS: in combination with imgtool classic (mkisofs) dvd-decrypter is going to get my standard burning tool - thanks again for your great application!

[fewtch]

Try disabling the Indexing Service (if it's not already)... on a PC with a lot of RAM, you shouldn't be getting much noticeable swapping. Might also be related to an antivirus scanner or defragger running in the background (?).

[NaN]

Thanks for your tips!

AntiVirus is disabled during the burn, the defragger is set to manual. But I will look at the indexing service, I'm pretty sure I activated that one to have faster searches.

Cheers, NaN

[fewtch]

Originally posted by NaN
Thanks for your tips!

AntiVirus is disabled during the burn, the defragger is set to manual. But I will look at the indexing service, I'm pretty sure I activated that one to have faster searches.

Cheers, NaN
That's what often kicks in background-wise, if you hear the HD spinning when the PC is idle. It never helped my searches much (YMMV), as it indexes only a few file types... uses quite a lot of system resources for what it does.

[Mr.Bitey]

Lightning UK!,

I find that burning with Dvd Decrypter, and loading applications (such as firefox) windows is busy as hell loading it (drive going nuts), during which time the ram buffer drops to rapidly 0 then the burnproof kicks in and reduces burning speed as necessary.. this is burning 4X on a P4 2.8ghz - DMA enabled. A larger ram buffer would help in thie case (to keep burning speeds up).. I'd second NaN's request for a massive buffer :-) - I havent lost a disc yet however, and have thrown away record-now max given DVD Decrypter works so well :)

Cheers,
Bitey

[NaN]

@Mr.Bitey: Thanks for seconding my request ;-))

@LIGHTNING UK!
Thanks again for your great tool! I'm loving it the more I use it ;-))

Just another idea: what do you think of a burn-proof kick-in counter? Maybe the write retries counter could be reused for that purpose? So unattendend burning without fear of not seeing possible kick-ins would be possible.

Call me paranoid, but my standalone just drop-outs these positions. Unfortunatly it's brand new, a Pioneer, so I'm definitly not the only one having these issues. That's for sure a reason why so many people burn their DVDs at 2.4x, even today.

What do you think of it?

Cheers & a big thanks! NaN

PS: in the moment I'm able to, I'll donate to the people on my list. You're #2 right after doom9.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

It's impossible to detect.

Many drives drop the buffer down to zero during their WOPC stuff.

If you have a Pioneer 109, make sure you're using the new 1.40 firmware. Previous versions had major problems burning DVD-R.

[NaN]

Oh, my burner is a Plextor. My dvd-standalone is a Pioneer - but thanks for your tip!

I'm sure that you would need secret docs to implement it correctly (at least for Plextor drives) since the Plextools are able to count the burn-proof kick-ins.

What about counting device buffer = 0 events?

Thanks for taking the time, you're a busy man!

Cheers, NaN

[johnhamler1]

liteon 1633sx, pentium m7, 1 gig memory...
do not know what s going on, 2 coaster on 2 different disc which usually work fine.buffer go to 0 in the middle of the burn (50-60%), then a error message error poped out.i used dvd decripter to burn the DVD.

will check for virus, spy, ...

[babaz]

Originally posted by LIGHTNING UK!
Burnproof should be flawless! If it's not, that's something the drive manufacturers need to sort out.

Just for you, I'll make the next one allow upto 256MB, but personally I see no reason for it.

Mine stays on 20 (default) all the time.

hi uk lightning, geeat work on your part :D
apart from the fact that burnproof should be flawless indeed, ar u saying that bunring at (say) 16x and still using the pc for other tasks (internet surfing, folders exploring, mp3 playng...) does not means *huge* and frequent disk trashing and dvddecypter's buffers (both) go empty and refill all the time )at least up until the disk trashing occurs...)

i'm on winxp sp2 512mb athlonXP 1800+ (nicely configured, IMHO of course) and when i choose to burn at high speed (higher say than 4x) i deliberately avoid to use the pc for other tasks - let it quiet to end the burning

does anybody experience this HEAVY disk trashing? i think so - would be strange otherwordly

[LIGHTNING UK!]

If you just have a single drive for the OS and your images, you will of course get a lot of thrashing if you make the machine perform some task that involves accessing the disc.

Personally I have a few drives and images are never stored on C:, so I'm free to use my pc however I like whilst it's burning stuff.

[babaz]

Originally posted by LIGHTNING UK!
If you just have a single drive for the OS and your images, you will of course get a lot of thrashing if you make the machine perform some task that involves accessing the disc.

Personally I have a few drives and images are never stored on C:, so I'm free to use my pc however I like whilst it's burning stuff.

tnx for reply... yes, i've just one phisical hard disk in my PC, partitioned yes, but phisically it's a single unit

so - if i correctly understand you - if i put the ISO images to be burned on a *different* hard disc unit i could get rid of *any* disk trashing and the like?

i think a lot of people are actually cursed by this behaviour, since a lot of guys just rely on a single HD unit ;)

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Yup, get another drive, put the images on that, and you shouldn't have any problems.