I never bother using my PC while burning. I didn't before I got my 52x burner because if i used the comp the dic would be a coaster (no buffer underrun on that burner). Now, with my 52x burner, there's no point. Disks burn in about 5-6 minutes, so why take the chance (i can goto the bathroom then! :) )

I am currently burning a DVD while I have Vegas encoding another MPEG2 file in the background and I’m surfing the forums and answering your post which involves using a word processor because I can’t spell worth a hill of beans so I always compose my posts and spell check ‘em, then cut and paste. I would not capture and burn at the same time because both require high bandwidth to the file system, but I regularly capture and do other things and burn and do other things all the time. I do have a P4 3.0Ghz PC with SATA capture drives and my DVD is on its own IDE channel. I would think that any newer PC should be able to keep up with a DVD burner and do other things.

~jr

I usually burn my video DVDs overnight. However, during a recent major project I would capture video while I was burning the previous completed AVIs to DVD for backup. I had no coasters and no dropped frames. I used two different disks so there was no conflict between the one I was capturing to and the one that was being backed up.

I guess that if your burner has some sort of "Burn-Proof" technology (which shuts off the laser if the buffer completely empties and begins again automatically at that exact spot when the buffer refills), then it shouldn't make any difference how hard you're working the PC at the time. In my case I've never had a bad disk due to PC workload. But just as some folks insist on burning at 1x, others might insist on leaving the PC alone while it does the burning.

The buffer overrun issue of older days is pretty much behind us. So if you have a reasonablly fast CPU (2GHz+) and a newer DVD burner you should be able to use your PC for other things while burning. I do sometimes. Made no coasters yet doing it.

I have an AMD 64, 1.5 gig of ram and all hardrives and DVD are on either a separate eide or SATI drive. I have a new Plextor 8x DVD +-R/RW and I burned several DVD's just fine, but when I opened my e-mail and did a few non-intensive task my DVD ended up having problems (even with buffer underrun). Using the OEM version of Roxio 6.0 that came with it.

The DVD looked fine, booted fine and appeared to work fine...however, when I did more analysis (i.e., watched more of the 1 hour video), I noticed that within several spots the DVD the picture would stall, or slow down (choppy). All the data was there, and the stalls would re-start, but they were still there--at least on my PC dvd player. I also tried two different DVD player applications, thinking it might be specific to the player, but I got the same stalls at the same spot both times...so I threw away the disk.

None of the other disk that were burned without doing anything else had any problems.

This is not scientific but doing something else at the same time was the only variable. I'm not sure how this would differ with an Intel with multitasking turned on.

This is only one test, but it is the only DVD where I did anything else during the burn. The others were all just fine without any stalls or anything.

I would like to see a more thourough test, but I did not like it that the DVD first appeared fine, but wasn't.

I've noticed that when I burn at "slower" speed on CD's (below 4x) I sometimes get compatibility problems with some CD drives (audio players and computer drives). This could be because they are older models (support max read speed of 4x-8x) but it could also just be my dumb luck.

Also, I've had a rare problem where a CD wouldn't read right in Win9x if the buffer stopped and the cd was paused to re-fiill the buffer (i belive this is because the laser is actuatly shutoff and it's counted as a new track when the laser starts up).

But, that's rare too (but does happen to me, new or old cd-drive it was being read in)

The CD issue is likely a media one. Now that media formulations and burners are optimized for higher speeds, lower ones don't work as well. I assume your burner is a high speed one and your media is the typical "40x" or higher?

Media marketed for use in audio recorders may work better; they're optimized for 1x and 2x, because that's typical of set top recorders.

I almost always use my PC while burning CDs or DVDs. I do a lot of test burns of DVDs to DVD-RW media, so I don't care if something happens and I have to start over. However, as it turns out, I have never had a problem. I never get an error message, the buffer display on DVDA never shows any problems, and the DVD plays fine.

Of course, DVDA almost completely takes over my PC while running. Even when not burning, other applications are very sluggish. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next release.