First, go ahead and burn at the rated speed of your media. Burning at slower speed is just wasting your time and in almost no case will it increase the quality of your burn. I base this on dozens of tests I've done over the years, as well as lots of reading on the subject.

As for as the main thrust of your question, there is nothing you can do to change the time it takes to burn the lead out ...

... except ...

... that you can use DVD+R media instead of DVD-R media. This makes a huge difference in the time it takes to burn the leadout: DVD-R takes a long time, wherease DVD+R is almost instantaneous.

I found this out many years ago because I always burn several short tests (5-30 seconds) on a DVD re-writable while I am preparing a project. I then view these tests on both a CRT and LCD screen to make sure everything looks OK. It was a pain in the neck to have the preparation and main burn take only twenty seconds, and then have to wait a minute or two for the leadout. I had standardized on DVD-R because, in the early days, they were more compatible with older players. So, I simply purchased DVD-RW for the re-writeables.

So, I thought that this was simply the way DVD burning worked, and I was stuck with it.

Then, for reasons I can't remember, I purchased some DVD+RW media and immediately found out that they required almost no time for leadouts. I now use 8x DVD+RW media, and I can do my test DVDs in a matter of seconds.

Hope that helps!

If you are burning at or near the full capacity of your disc, the burn speed will affect playability near the end of the program (outer edge), more noticeably by skipping or stuttering on older or b-line home players. Usually redoing these discs by backing off just one step on burn speed is enough to even the playing field, assuming you have good quality media to start with.

Tests run near the center of the disc or with a shorter program will likely not show a difference in errors.

"and in almost no case will it increase the quality of your burn"

John is correct, it has nothing to do with quality, but I have delivered hundreds of DVD's over the past ten years and only two were returned as unplayable.

While there is no emperical data to support the claim that burning at less than the max speed produces fewer coasters, there is a lot of anecdotal experience.

Here's my anecdote:

In 2004, I burned 100 DVD+R discs of a show. Of those, around seventy were distributed, and six were returned. One was fixed by giving them a DVD-R, and the other five played fine using the same media, but at a lower burn speed.

Since then (six mainstage productions), I have had one disc returned, and the replacement didn't play either. The guy eventually called me to say their decade-old player had started emitting smoke, and they replaced it.

Some older players can't handle sustained bitrates much above 6Mbps, either. That one I have tested empirically.

While there is no emperical data to support the claim that burning at less than the max speed produces fewer coasters, there is a lot of anecdotal experience.That is not true. There is a massive amount of empirical data, such as the hundreds of thousands of media tests done at this site:

CD Freaks

I have also done dozens and dozens of my own tests. It is very easy to download and use Nero CD-Speed or similar tool and look at the underlying error rates on any DVD or CD. Any media -- including hard drives -- is designed to permit bad bits, but still keep the data 100% intact. This is done by encoding redundant bits and then reconstructing any missing data on the fly. The CD-Speed test tool reports on the error rate. The quality of the burn can therefore be determined -- with certainty -- by recording the number of errors on the disc.

To test the theory that burning at a slower speed produces a better disc, all you have to do is burn a few at one speed, and then burn some more at another speed. The discs should all be the same media from the same batch, and the content be burned should be the same. I often have to burn 50+ discs, and I always do these tests each time I start a large burn.

I have NEVER once found a difference in quality by going to a slower speed. Not even a minor improvement.

This is not to say that the idea is entirely an urban legend. It is certainly possible that older burners and older media were more sensitive to burn speed. And, since I obviously don't have data on every possible media and burner combination, it is always possible that some combination could have a problem burning the media at the media's rated speed.

You definitely never want to try burning at faster than the rated speed of either the media or your burner (some burning software permits this).

So not only is the advice to burn at a slower speed not supported by actual testing, there is a fair amount of evidence that discs burned at slower speed will not be as good: with modern media, burning at a slower speed can actually result in a worse burn because the melting of the recording layer is designed with the assumption that the disc will be rotating at a given linear velocity.

I highly recommend reading this excellent thread from the forum linked to above:

Slow write speeds + modern drives + modern media = no good

You can also find similar information in this FAQ from the DigitalFAQ site:

DVD Burning and Media Quality Concepts

Scroll down until you get to the heading: "Myth of Burning Slower."

So, to make recommendations for people to burn at a slower speed is really bad advice. The much better recommendation is for them to do their own tests and decide for themselves. Most of them will find -- just as the people at the site linked to above have found -- that slower burn speeds does not create a higher quality disc.

John,

I don't think anyone suggested that burning slower somehow results in better quality.
I've never had a burned disc returned because of quality, only playability.
Hope you understood that from my post.

Coincidentally, all returns ended when I dropped back one notch on burning speed, about six years ago.
;?)

Burning a DVD won't improve the "quality" of the sound or video, of course. We're working with digital data -- so it's either there or it's not. There's no such thing as reduced quality video.

However, burning a DVD at no more than 4x can help improve the integrity of the disc -- increasing the likelihood that it will play on standalone DVD player.

I was told by three different Duplication/Replication houses (which I now do in house) that I should ALWAYS burn at the slowest speed for data quality, not improving the quality of the DVD or content.

Now, they duplicate/replicate millions of discs, so I was taking their advice. Now that I am doing it myself and have the requirement to duplicate onsite, I have to come up with the combination or speed and reliability.

I will try the +R and -R test to see if the +R causes issues with the duplicator I have.

John - thanks for the information. I was unaware of the tests you refered to. I think part of the confusion in this thread is the meaning of "quality". Most users think in terms of video image quality, which is completely irrelevant. You are referring to quality as data integrity.

Like Musicvid, when I started years ago, I was burning at the highest data rate, and when some of those discs came back unplayable, I cut the burn rate in half and I have ever had an unplayable disc since then.

It's quite likely that we're both right. Five years ago the overwhelming anecdotal experience was to burn at slower than the maximum data rates. Today, as your tests indicate, the hardware, software and media have likely matured and the former precautions may not be required.

As you say, test.

Note, I was burning CD's when they were brand new media and blanks cost over $1 each. We experienced the dreaded "buffer underrun" daily and had a failure rate exceeding 50%. When the burning S/W finally provided data-rate choices (the first-version only burned at the fastest data rate, usually 2X) we set the burn rate to 1X and dropped our failure rate to 40%.

Note, I was burning CD's when they were brand new media and blanks cost over $1 each. We experienced the dreaded "buffer underrun" daily and had a failure rate exceeding 50%.Yes, those were different days indeed. Both articles above briefly mention those problems back then, especially the computer's inability to deliver enough data "on time" to be able to keep up with even a paltry (by today's standards) 1x CD burn.

I too got into CD burning very early on when Mike Cowpland sent one of the first CD drives to me in 1990 or 1991 because Corel was about to make an aggressive move into CD content. It was a 1x Sony drive and required a SCSI interface! Actually, now that I think about it, that was a read only CD drive. My first CD burner was a Ricoh, and it was very, very touchy. I think I got an HP drive a few years later that would burn at 2x. Because media were so expensive and bad burns so common, I always did a "simulated" burn and more often than not found that my system couldn't keep up with 2x (buffer underrun).

However, for at least a decade, most modern computers have no trouble delivering data to CD and DVD burners. I routinely do multiple tasks while burning DVDs at 8X.

I have never purchased 16x media because everything I've read, and my own experience with some 16x samples, indicates that they don't provide anything even close to 2x the performance improvement compared to 8x. Part of this is because I standardized long ago on -R media and, as we've discussed in response to the OP's question, -R media takes over a minute to burn lead in and lead out, whereas +R media is almost instantaneous (less than ten seconds total). Most of the posts over a CD Freaks indicates that 16x burns just fine at rated speed, but a few tests do occasionally show slightly lower burn quality.

I was pleased to see someone with the gravitas of johnmeyer weigh in on the oft-revisited subject of burn speeds vs resultant burn quality, as he always provides a well-composed, thorough analysis of his own exhaustive testing and research, as well as concisely summed-up and sourced references of other credible studies. While I am not claiming that he is always 100% correct down to the punctuation, I have abiding respect for his opinions, as do most of us.

There seems to be a misunderstanding about his use of the term 'quality'. John was referencing the disc quality tests performed by CD Speed/DiskSpeed, not a vague, subjective evaluation of the the video content of the burned discs.

I don't think there will ever be a consensus on this issue. People will always recommend what works for them and cite what they feel has bitten them on the butt. I have had great success with burning DVDs at higher rates, although there's frequently the nagging 'slow down, this is an important disc' in the back of my mind, based upon various forum admonitions. And I'll probably continue to burn at higher speeds until negative personal experience suggest that I should do otherwise.

To each, his (or her!) own...