I would like a hugely technical explanation also. [JJK]

LOL, not too technical or I won't understand it! (I'm serious.)

Jay

I heard that burning CD's faster was better. But it IS confusing. One thing I DO know is that faster rated media is better: it's designed better (and can be burned at a better speed).

I never heard that DVD at 1x though.

I would also think that the DVD's you buy movies on are faster because they aren't liquid, they're metal, & the metal doesn't move after a whlie (like the liquid does).

i think. :)

Why are the burner and disc manufacturers pushing this particular envelope if the results are questionable?

To move their product, of course. When John Q Public hears that Company ABC has a burner that's WHOO-HOO SMOKIN' FAST!er than the one currently produced by Company XYZ, he's gonna run down to the computer store and buy the new ABC DVD-SUPAHFAST. It's also for bragging rights. And finally, most people either don't notice the difference in errors or don't attribute that difference to the speed.

Also, why is this apparently not a problem when burning CDs?

AFAIK, it is. Once in a while, I trade with folks that collect live concerts on CDR. All of the "hardcore" traders swear by burning at between 1x and preach that burning at, 8x, 16x, or higher will introduce errors. I'm pretty casual and have tin ears, anyhow, so I don't notice much difference.

Rob

Commercial DVDs aren't burned. They're pressed, much like LPs once were. A stamping die impresses the pits on the metallic substrate all in one whack. This makes commercial copying very fast.

Yes, i suppose you could do this at home too if you wanted to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the equipment and have your DVDs cost many thousands of dollars each in small quantities. It probably wouldn't be worthwhile until you start selling millions of copies of each DVD you make.

My Panasonic A04 DVD player is rated at 2X but somehow DVDA2.0 always sets the burn rate at 1X. Is there anyway to override that and are others finding that it sets lower burn rates too?

- MarcS
www.clayeeyecenter.com

There are so many better burning packages available than DVDA (more features, better burner support, etc.), that I've pretty much stopped burning using DVDA entirely.

--Scott

Scott, although that has little to do with my question, I must say that I have found DVDA2 to be an excellent burning app.

Jay

Obviously, the advantage of burning at more than 1X is that it takes less time. My burner's max speed is 2.4X, and it takes about 20-25 minutes to make copies of my full DVDs, so if I want to hand out a dozen copies, I'm looking at a lot of time.

Because the laser has to burn microscopic pits onto the dye on the blank media, the faster the speed, the more precision is required. I once saw a photo comparing what the pits looked like when burnt at 1X versus 4X, and the 1X pits looked much better defined, so it would logically follow that many players would have an easier time reading the DVDs burnt at the slower speeds.

Maybe you'd want to burn your "master" (archive copy) at 1X and the copies you hand out can be burnt at faster speeds to save time. Having said that, I usually burn all of my DVDs at the fastest speed the hardware/software/media support, and I don't remeber having any problems. Although there is one DVD that I could swear used to work, and now it doesn't (although it looks perfectly fine to the naked eye... no scratches, etc).

Sorry, I was responding to MarcS and his problem with 2X. Calling DVDA an excellent burning app is a bit of a stretch I think. For those people who have burners that DVDA doesn't support, or who need to build something as simple as a hybrid DVD, then it's far from excellent. Anyway...

It seems to me that a lot of factors influence how playable a DVD is when burnt at higher speeds - quality of the media, quality of the drive mechanics, quality of the player.

If you use poor quality media, then you could end up with a coaster regardless of what speed you burn at.

The reason speeds keep getting pushed up is time. If I have a project where I have to burn 8 DVD's with 1 hour of material on them, I'd rather not have it take 8 hours if I can burn the entire project in 2 hours and achieve the same results (which so far seems to be the case).

Actually, burning speed is/was a problem with CD's as well; but the other aspect is the data rate. CD data rates are far, far lower than the data rates used on DVD. For CD's the issue was the drive mechanics, once you get up into the higher speeds you got so much wobble that you couldn't burn reliably.

Looks like 16X may be the limit for DVD's.

--Scott

There's an aweful lot of urban myths about this and with all due respect, the audio guys have habits that die VERY hard.

There's two factors at play.
1) How much the disk wobbles as it's spun. It doesn't take much to figure out that making it spin faster will make it spin with less wobble, assuming you have a good drive and the disk isn't junk i.e. the hole is in the middle. Burning CDs at 1x significantly increases the wobble, in fact today you have to buy special media to even get it to burn at 1x
2) The sensitivity of the dye layer. Obviously the faster the disk spins the less energy there is from the laser to burn a hole in the dye layer. So you make the dye layer thinner or use a more sensitive dye. Neither of these do much for the longevity of the media. But burning at a lower speed does nothing, what matters is the maximum speed the media is rated at. So if you've got 4x DVDs burning them at 1x will NOT make them last longer, in fact it's possible the burner will not be able to throttle the laser back enough to burn at that speed, too much heat is going to make the pits too big.

So that's the theory, how does it stack up in practice?

Well I burn a few audio master CDs, these are rated for burning at 1x to 10x. My Plexwriter will not burn them below 4x however the error rates are within tolerance at 8x and slightly better than at 4x.
I also have some archival master CDs rated for high speed burning. With these at 20x the errors are much, much lower than the old style 1x to 10x media. This agrees with the theory.
Now DVDs are different in many respects but still the same technology when it comes to how they get recorded. So far I've had problems with 4x media burnt at 1x that went away when burnt at 4x.
What will be the BIG issue is the 8x and 16x DVD media. The dye layers are now so thin it's hard to see them lasting very long at all. There's no technical wizardry involved from what I've heard so far, it's just been a matter of making a dye layer thin enough and getting a good enough yield that has held these things back. But I suspect very shortly there'll be all we'll be able to buy. Again buring them at lower speed will achieve nothing, in fact it'll most likely give a poorer result.

As to WHY they're making 16x DVDs, well it's one way to sell more DVD burners. But it seems much of the impetus is coming from the STB DVD recorder manufacturers. Obviously unless you're burning from a HD then it would seem to serve no advantage except for the finalisation time. Faster media means they can make this process so fast it can be done as soon as you hit the Eject button. In other words the consummers will not have to go through a separate finalisation phase, for this me thinks we are all going to pay a big price.

It's interesting about the wobble you mentioned, because I was just reading an article that said the issue with higher speeds for CD was because of too much wobble. At one point the highest speed was 32X until different/new motors were used that could compensate for the wobble from spinning the media at a higher speed than 32x.

Sounds like there's a range involved - too slow is as bad as too fast.

--Scott

This is a very deep subject, and web sites such as www.cdrinfo.com have detailed tests of new CD and DVD burners.

The issue is not burn speed, but rather the error rate. The user of the finished CD or DVD wants a disk that plays without errors.

From my limited knowledge in these things, a burned CD can be tested using a variety of utilities, such as Nero's CD/DVD speed. Graphs can be made which show the error rate across the width of the disk. Every disk shows errors; what matters is the error quantity, since there will come a point where the built-in error correcting algorithm can't cope any more, and a hard error results. For CDs playing music, we don't care very much, but for a data CD a single error is fatal.

Same thing for DVDs, though the graphs use different parameters. The whole point is that it is assumed that a CD or DVD will contain some errors, but what matters is the quantity of errors. That's what drives the burner vendors to write into their firmware just which brands of blank disks can be burned at what speeds.

In other words, if a burner/blank combination is blessed by the vendor for burning at a certain speed, then you can confidently burn at that speed. All you gain by burning at 1x is time to twiddle your thumbs. I have burned hundreds of DVD-R Ritek blanks at 4x, with nary a glitch. When 8x media gets cheaper, I will burn at 8x.

Go to that www.cdrinfo.com page and look at the review of the Sony 700 burner on the left column. They give enough burning data and graphs to make my head hurt.

If you really want your head to hurt...

CINRAM in Canada is the company that manufactures the millions of DVDs for most of the Hollywood studios. Of course, they don't "burn" them, but here is a technical paper from their Website with more than you wanna know about DVD manufacturing:

DVD In Detail

Calling DVDA an excellent burning app is a bit of a stretch I think.

Well, Scott, you're entitled to your opinions, just like the rest of us are. As I said, it works with my Pioneer A06 just fine, it does everything I need it to do, so for me, it is an excellent application.

Jay