Prevents buffer underrun conditions when burning CD's, DVD's. Most of the newer drives already have this kind of technology built in.

For those in the dark, a CD or DVD burner requires a near constant data stream to avoid having its data buffer empty. If that happens, writing halts and you are almost certain to end up with a coaster rather than a useable disk. We're taking very short intruptions, milliseconds. While later versions of Windows are true multitasking operating systems, your CPU still can only do one thing at a time. The more you got going at once the smaller the time slice each application gets. That's why you should always disable anti-virus, screen savers and to be safe exit all other applications prior to burning any media even if they aren't in a active state. If not, a hunderd odd milliseconds or less is all it takes for the burner's buffer to empty. Once you start a burning process it can't be stopped, if the buffer empties, you pretty much guaranteed you'll ruin the disk you're trying to burn. So-called "burn proof" technology invented by Richo a couple years ago and licensed to other companies uses a scheme to prevent ruining a disk by prevent or severely limiting the chance of buffer underrun. Far more then you probably wanted to know. Sorry, got carried away. :-)

The "internal" tab is a debug menu for testing purposes, not hidden settings for users to fool with. =) Sometimes you'll find stuff in there that SoFo is toying with / working on that is not currently intended for use, so it'd be best to leave it alone. Second, that setting should only be enabled if you have a burn-proof CD writer. As Billy mentioned, it's a hardware feature, not a nifty software trick. Unless you have burn-proof-capable hardware, don't check that box. And even if you do, it should be enabled automatically by the program.

Regards,
Nick LaMartina

Actually the burn-proof technology was developed by Sanyo.

For those of you that have burn-proof capable drives, I'd encourage you to turn this feature on.

There's no promise that that internal preference actually does anything or is safe to use.

Also, a couple of additional notes to the previous discussion: Modern CD burners have fairly large buffers, on the order of a few seconds worth of burn data, so millisecond interruptions no longer cause buffer underruns. This varies by drive, of course, so your results may vary.

Burn-Proof and other technologies don't *prevent* buffer underruns, but should one occur, they are able to pick up where they left off and keep burning. They do this by stopping the burn in a reasonably safe place between sectors. Any bit errors caused by the stop/restart are not a problem. At least that's my understanding based on what I've read. Each (trademarked) version is probably done slightly differently so avoid patent infringement.

///d@