Basic DVD ripping / burning questions [was: 2 Questions]

[bwfc]

1) What speed should you burn at? Does a higher speed affect the burn?

2) Can you carry on using your PC whilst ripping and burning?

[ammck55]

Welcome to the forum!

1. It's been suggested to burn at the speed your drive is rated for. Have you been having trouble in this area? If so, run a search on "speed" or "burning", you'll find some good info this way. Another source of information would be to lurk in the Burning forum. Rewriteable discs will save you some headaches, and coasters, until you get your burning procedures sorted.

2. I've never had any trouble ripping while using a secondary user account. I don't remember who first suggested it, but if you'd like to try this method and haven't set up user accounts before, with Windows XP, go to Control Panel and click on User Accounts, it's a simple task. Get started, then just log off that account and on to the other. Burning your files is a CPU intensive task, and I have had problems while trying to execute other programs with a burn running. This could be a lack of system resources on my machine's part, my suggestion here would be, "Try it and see what happens!" Good luck!

ammck55

[bwfc]

Thanks, but what do you mean by burn by what speed your machine is rated.

Is it that my DVD-R is 4x so I burn at that.

Thanks for the welcome.

[killingspree]

hi bwfc and welcome to the forum,

just some small additions to complete ammck55's excellent answers:

1) generally the speed you should burn on depends on a couple of factors:
- the quality of the +/-R media
- your burner
- amount of data you burn on the DVDR (if you burn the full 4.7 gigs you are far more likely to get an accumulation of burning errors towards the outer rim of the disk (end of movie) - so if you really fill the DVD, drop the burning speed slightly!)

2) generally yes. whilst burning i wouldn't do any CPU intensive tasks (playing games, working with videos in general - editing etc) but a bit of surfing the internet, processing documents or other tasks alike shouldn't be a problem

hth
steVe
PS: pls use a more desciptive title next time you post a question around here. for your convenience i changed the one of this threads so that other newbies who might be searching for the same answers find this thread more easily!

[bwfc]

I understand your comments and thanks for the guidance.