Just realized I can burn a DVD while...

[lakedude]

Just realized I can burn a DVD while...

Surfing or watching Netflix or both, even on a laptop. This my not seem like much but for many years I avoided doing anything else while burning a disk. Every few years I'd try to multitask and after making a few coasters I'd once again quit doing anything else while burning.

When do you think the hardware and software got good enough to handle multitasking while burning?

 

[VirtualLarry]

When do you think the hardware and software got good enough to handle multitasking while burning?

Uhm, mid-90s with the introduction of "Burn-Proof"? (Better ask BURPO about that... 🙂 )

 

[redzo]

Starting with windows Xp. I'm pretty sure less than Xp windows machines were crashing(BSOD) when reading/loading something from a damaged CD. Os design issue.

 

[sm625]

Probably when drives moved up to 2MB caches. It is sad to think that 1MB of cache wouldnt be enough, but windows is windows. Software has never been very smart with I/O. I still rant and rave about how a typical music player app will go and get data from the disk every 6-8 seconds. Why not just load the entire song into RAM once and be done with it? Because stupid...

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Surfing or watching Netflix or both, even on a laptop. This my not seem like much but for many years I avoided doing anything else while burning a disk. Every few years I'd try to multitask and after making a few coasters I'd once again quit doing anything else while burning.

It likely because you use an SSD. That takes care of the most likely bottleneck, random disk I/O.

I don't burn much these days, except backups, but I have thought about simply loading the entire disk image or files into RAM. Its "only" ~5GB (or ~8GB for DL DVDs) worth after all. Which could be done with a simple RAM disk... 😎

 

[JeffMD]

Burning while doing things has been a non issue since..well..burn proof. In the early 2000 burn proof had reduced the gap between burns (during interruptions) to almost nothing. That said, I too always did very little while burning to prevent interruptions because I burned at high speeds and the less errors the better. Also because I burned at high speeds, It is not like I needed to sit down and do anything else, I couldn't get into a movie or anything.

Whats nice is buying a new dvd unit now, even the cheap Lite-Ons, you can pretty much burn at the fastest speed possible and as long as the media wasn't crap, it will burn. I stuck to 12x for the longest time but when I finally dropped the pioneer and got a liteon upgrade, I was shocked to see I could do 16x burns no problem, and MAX burns hit about 18-20x and while it had plenty of class 1 errors, no class 2 errors so the disc was still readable.

 

[C1]

One of the issues with doing what you are doing is reading a burnt disk from the drive that created it.

However, if the disk is for someone else (with a different hardware), then you should test your disk across different hardware, particularly those using different brands/qualities of CD/DvD drives to ensure that there is no interoperability issue.

 

[lakedude]

I'm almost certain that I still had problems multitasking while burning after burnproof and after xp. Seems like older dual cores were not enough as well.

The current laptop has tons of ram, a quad with ht and an ssd for hardware and W8 for software.

Also I might be on less sketchy sites these days..

 

[JimmiG]

I can't even remember the last time I burned something to CD or DVD. Must have been some time in the mid 00's.

Being able to burn 4.7 GB to disc and delete it from the HDD to save space was a huge deal back in the day (when we all had ~60 GB IBM Deathstars). Then multi-terabyte HDD's happened. I briefly looked into recordable blu-ray for backups, but an external HDD ended up much cheaper, faster and more convenient.

 

[PliotronX]

I concur, it's been very nice. The very first CD burner I messed with used a parallel port for blazing fast 2X speeds with a 486-DX4 and if you so much as moved the cursor too much, there goes a $20 blank disc into the trash. When I got my first SCSI burner, a Yamaha CRW-4416 everything changed 😀 Later on with the advent of buffer underrun protection in both hardware and software (Nero by default uses 64-128MB of system RAM as a giant buffer to feed the drive), I have not had a single coaster in well over a decade.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I briefly looked into recordable blu-ray for backups, but an external HDD ended up much cheaper, faster and more convenient.

You forgot something important. HDDs are all of the above, but they're not necessarily more reliable. For the usual variety of reasons. Which is pretty important when we're talking backup.

So ideally, you use both... :biggrin:

 

[JeffMD]

I relied on dvd's to archive my anime fansubs for the past 15 years. I finally went with 2 external hard drives that mirror each other. I even had the main one setup on my plex server and it has all the meta data loaded, but due to quality issues with plex I am currently just playing off a network drive. I miss the beautiful plex UI. 🙁

 

[JimKiler]

Starting with windows Xp. I'm pretty sure less than Xp windows machines were crashing(BSOD) when reading/loading something from a damaged CD. Os design issue.

It was before that if you used good software like Disc Juggler. That software was pretty good at letting you still multitask while burning disc pre burn proof. But alas that software has not been updated since 2006.

 

[ElFenix]

I concur, it's been very nice. The very first CD burner I messed with used a parallel port for blazing fast 2X speeds with a 486-DX4 and if you so much as moved the cursor too much, there goes a $20 blank disc into the trash. When I got my first SCSI burner, a Yamaha CRW-4416 everything changed 😀 Later on with the advent of buffer underrun protection in both hardware and software (Nero by default uses 64-128MB of system RAM as a giant buffer to feed the drive), I have not had a single coaster in well over a decade.

i remember those days. except replace DX4 with SX33.

and we left the room while it was burning.

 

[C1]

Im fortunate that all my machines (notebooks & desktops) support DvDRAM.

DvDRAM is true "random access" and with 5X Verbatin disks writes are pretty fast.

 

[Burpo]

Uhm, mid-90s with the introduction of "Burn-Proof"? (Better ask BURPO about that... 🙂 )

Thanks Larry.. haha :sneaky: For me it was when I had 4 threads available to do the work. Alas, sometime if I forget when burning a Blu-Ray I can still get stutters with this old quad core. The X58 system & LG Blu-Ray burner doesn't have this issue..

 

[VirtualLarry]

I concur, it's been very nice. The very first CD burner I messed with used a parallel port for blazing fast 2X speeds with a 486-DX4 and if you so much as moved the cursor too much, there goes a $20 blank disc into the trash. When I got my first SCSI burner, a Yamaha CRW-4416 everything changed 😀 Later on with the advent of buffer underrun protection in both hardware and software (Nero by default uses 64-128MB of system RAM as a giant buffer to feed the drive), I have not had a single coaster in well over a decade.

My first CD burner was a 2x external SCSI, that I bought used from a co-worker at the time. Then I bought a factory-refurb Yamaha 6416S. Wow, was that a GREAT drive. Used it until the wheels fell off, pretty much. (It would burn, but fail to verify the burn it just made. Wasn't the media.)

Then they came out with IDE DVD-RWs, and SCSI wasn't needed any more for decent burns. Burn-proof and similar tech came out right around then too. (TEAC - remember them? - had a decent IDE burner out early-on.)

 

[Rifter]

My first CD burner was a 2x external SCSI, that I bought used from a co-worker at the time. Then I bought a factory-refurb Yamaha 6416S. Wow, was that a GREAT drive. Used it until the wheels fell off, pretty much. (It would burn, but fail to verify the burn it just made. Wasn't the media.)

Then they came out with IDE DVD-RWs, and SCSI wasn't needed any more for decent burns. Burn-proof and similar tech came out right around then too. (TEAC - remember them? - had a decent IDE burner out early-on.)

TEAC made some badass drives, so did plextor back in the day.

 

[lakedude]

..blazing fast 2X speeds with a 486-DX4 and if you so much as moved the cursor too much, there goes a $20 blank disc into the trash...

LOL I remember those days. SCSI was like SSDs are now. Later the 10,000 RPM Raptors were the thing. I still have some Raptors in service...

I'm telling y'all that being confident enough in a system to multitask while burning is a recent thing for me, this in spite of typically investing in fast drives like SCSI or Raptors in the past. I'm wondering if the SSD is the larger part of the equation. CPU loading is minimal since DMA. Oh God, burning before DMA, forget about it!

 

[MaxPower83]

i still burn some DVDs or CD-Audio for my car stereo. I don't know why , but even though i have a more than capable system (i5 3550 , 8GB RAM and a Crucial SSD) when i start burning i stop doing anything else and i don't use full speed ( 8x for DVD and 12x for cd audio)

 

[pcgeek11]

This post made me laugh... The tech for CD Burning was awful when it started. I know I had to get about a 60% coaster rate.

 

[JimKiler]

This post made me laugh... The tech for CD Burning was awful when it started. I know I had to get about a 60% coaster rate.

The original Pioneer home CD copiers were the worst, a 66% failure rate but they heated the discs up to 1000 degrees or so. Your PC burner should not have been anywhere near that failure rate unless you created buffer underrun.

TEAC made some badass drives, so did plextor back in the day.

Plextor was the bomb! They had SCSI CD-ROM with little ball bearings to more evenly distribute the weight allowing discs to spin faster. Now we would not care because all optical media are slow!!!

 

[TidusZ]

I can't even remember the last time I burned something to CD or DVD. Must have been some time in the mid 00's.

Being able to burn 4.7 GB to disc and delete it from the HDD to save space was a huge deal back in the day (when we all had ~60 GB IBM Deathstars). Then multi-terabyte HDD's happened. I briefly looked into recordable blu-ray for backups, but an external HDD ended up much cheaper, faster and more convenient.

It is cheaper to give away a dvd than a flash drive though.. assuming the person has a dvd drive which isn't always the case anymore

 

[DaveSimmons]

Athlon X2 helped a lot too, having 2 cores meant if your interactive task spiked one core your other one could keep feeding the CD burner.

 

[rchunter]

I can't even remember the last time I burned something to CD or DVD. Must have been some time in the mid 00's.

Me too. I've got 2 unopened 100 pack spindles of verbatim dvd's sitting here that i'm betting will get thrown out 10 years from now... I plan on keeping them around for awhile "just in case".