OT: DVD-R writes take over 7 hours!

Laurence wrote on 1/2/2003, 11:40 PM

I just put together a new P4 2.4 computer. In it, I put my DVD writer (one of the original Pioneers, an A03 I believe) that I had been using in a firewire case. Now when I try to write a DVD it absolutely takes forever, well six or seven hours anyway! As it is writing, the drive read/write light will light for three seconds then go out for the next eight, then keep cycling three seconds for each eight off.

I recently did the "mandatory update" on Pioneer's website. I am not certain that I actually wrote any DVDs since then in the firewire case either, so it could be related to flash update and not the new computer the drive is sitting in.

Has anyone else run into this problem, or have any ideas of how I might fix it? I'm using "Dazzle DVD complete" software and haven't tried a burn with other software.

The latest DVD I've tried to burn is about 2.3 gigabytes. There's no reason I can think of why it should be taking over seven hours to write!

Laurence Kingston

Comments

markrad wrote on 1/3/2003, 12:24 AM

Laurence,
For starters what version DVD Complete and Veritas Engine are you running?
Are you creating an MPEG2 Compliant file in Vegas that will be accepted into DVD Complete? If not Dazzle will do a RE-render.
Having said that here is an example of render time on my PIII 733MHz war horse.
It took Vegas just over 13 hours render a to 79 minute project into MPEG2 format at 6.5Mbps. (Took a long nap about that time)
Dazzle took another 1.5 hours to build the DVD, followed by the actual Burn time. (Using a Sony DRU-500A for that)
Now what was your complaint again? :-)

FYI-
Version 2.06 Update for Dazzle DVD Complete Deluxe-
http://www.dazzle.com/support/updates_DVDComplete.html
and
Veritas PX Engine Update-
http://www.dvdcre8.com/updates/VeritasPXEngine358.htm

Glad to converse with another VEGAS/DVD Complete user! Let me know how things work out.

MR

Paul_Holmes wrote on 1/3/2003, 9:49 AM

I too have an A03 and have done the mandatory updates with no problems. I have used it both inside my Athlon 1800 and now as a firewire. I do believe I was able to write a DVD about 20% faster when it was part of the IDE (although I won't swear by that. I think burning time is pretty fixed and precise). Writing at my max of 2X I burn a full 4gig plus DVD in 50 minutes. Even if you were burning an RW it shouldn't take much more than an hour and a half. However, I create the DVD on my hard drive first (Audio and Video TS files) and then use Veratis Primo DVD to burn from the hard drive to the DVD. If you're burning directly from your authoring program maybe it's an issue of re-encoding. Or, as you said, you might want to make sure you got the right flash update. Maybe you have to re-flash it.

BillyBoy wrote on 1/3/2003, 10:37 AM

Wow, that's a long time to burn a DVD!

Is your drive 'second generation' that runs at about 24X? I know the speed scale is weird for DVD drives. A 2.4 - 2.5 is roughly the same as a 24X CD burner.

I can burn a full DVD in around a hour (rough estimate) using a HP 200i burner.

Are you including the time to re encode? That's sounds like what the problem really is. It depends on your DVD Authoring software. For example Ulead's DVD Movie Factory accepts the DV NTSC MPEG-2 'as-is' from Vegas, maybe what you're using don't, or you using AVI, which means it is going to get re encoded.

Laurence wrote on 1/3/2003, 10:38 AM

At the point of the 7 hour write, all the rendering and disk building has already been done. As unbelievable as it may seem, it takes that much time to write from the DVD disk image file! I haven't a clue why.

Laurence Kingston

Laurence wrote on 1/4/2003, 11:50 AM

Well the Pioneer drive has the latest bios update, and I just updated my Dazzle DVD Complete. Burning a 40 minute DVD still takes 7 hours and ten minutes. That's a burn from an image file, all the rendering is already done. This really has me stumped! I guess my next step is to put the drive back in the firewire case and try it with my laptop to try to determine if the problem is in the drive, or somewhere else in my system.

riredale wrote on 1/4/2003, 8:02 PM

Something is strange here.

I author my projects with an obscure program called "DVD Wise" and the result is a VIDEO_TS folder on my hard drive. Now I need to take that folder and burn it on a DVD-R. I use Nero for this task. If I burn at 1X, it takes about 1 hour for a project that uses the full disk. If I use media that allow burning at 2X (I'm using a Pioneer -04, a slightly updated version of the -03) then the burning takes almost exactly 30 minutes, or half the time as before. I presume if I were to use the new 4X media on a new Pioneer -05 drive, the time would be halved again, to 15 minutes.

So the actual burning time is a well-known number. I recall that "1X" means about 1.3MB/sec, which works out to about 60 minutes for a full disk (4.37GB). Something else must be happening here. I would suggest getting a copy of Nero or something similar to verify that your burner is working properly by just copying files to DVD-RW.

stepfour wrote on 1/4/2003, 11:45 PM

My best guess would be that flashing your AO3 like you did has done "something" undesirable, but it's worth mentioning that DVD complete will take a lot longer to burn if your authoring is complex, i.e, lots of motion menu buttons (with long motion length settings), overtures, several music selections for menus, or, several movies on one project.

Laurence wrote on 1/5/2003, 1:49 AM

Here is a post from another guy with a similar problem:

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/5135

I also found the following post which I think may be relevant:

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php3?ID=4557

My new system has an UDMA133 controller on the MB. Maybe the Pioneer drive is incompatible with this controller enough so that extra error correction kicks in and slows down the write. That would explain the "3 seconds write light on, 8 seconds write light off" loop that I'm getting. I'll try switching to PIO mode tomorrow. Is anyone successfully using the A03 with an UDMA 100 or UDMA 133 EIDE controller?

Laurence Kingston

Laurence wrote on 1/5/2003, 2:02 AM

This is off a Pioneer FAQ page:

Q14: Does the DVR-A03 support Ultra DMA (UDMA)?
A14: No. Pioneer recommends using a standard 40-pin / 40-conductor ribbon cable in a Master/Slave configuration.
Return to DVR-A03

Laurence wrote on 1/5/2003, 12:16 PM

The problem is now fixed. I switched the EIDE interface to PIO mode instead of UDMA and DVD write speed went back to normal:)

I guess what happened is that the Pioneer A03 UDMA incompatibility would generate errors and the "burn proof" drive feature must have paused the write each time the errors overfilled the 2 meg drive buffer. That would explain why the write light would cycle on and off. With all the pauses, the drive write speed slowed way down. I imagine that the PIO mode is not as efficient as DMA transfers would be, but none the less I'm a lot better off than I was.