DVD burner is slow - 1.20x

Does it finish at that speed?

a current state of mind :roll:

Yes, the entire burn is about that speed.
It will occasionally go to 1.00x and rarely 1.40x briefly.

Al
aka BigBopper

Does nobody have any ideas???

Maybe its the type of media you are using, as low quality blanks have a lower speed rating.

Julz

Nope, that's not the issue.

I am using quality media like Imation and Memorex. The problem is the same with any type of media used.

This system dual boots to windows. While in windows, using the same media and burner, it will burn at just over 8x, which is the speed rating of the media.

i have found that dvd-r burns a lot slower than dvd+r
i'm not sure if dvd-rw is slower still
my dvd+rw are tdk and the dvd-rw are imation

I've used a variety of formats. DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW. The RW discs are rated at 4x and the R disc have been rated at 4x and 8x. All with the same 1.20x burn speed.

Since I first tried Linux in all it's various flavours, I have the same to be true of almost all optical CD burning. While for me, it has been possible to manually select a higher speed, I have found the resulting disks have had less readability and/or reliability outside of my machine. In windows, I can get full speed, but at the risk of failed burns. In Mepis, not a single failed burn using the system defined settings.

To learn more about the how and why of burning optical disks, find your burner model on www.cdfreaks.com (they cover dvd's too) and read all about it. This may not help you with k3b, but it will give you a better understanding and hopefully more patience with your system.

Open up the computer and disconnect the dvd burner, then boot up with out the dvd burner connected. After it boots shuts down and reconnect the dvd burner. Now it hopefully will write at the correct speed.good luck.

So I'm burning a couple DVD iso's, and they burn at, the typical for Mepis, 1.20x. I needed to burn a cd, so I do that, I didn't pay attention to the burn speed on the cd. I then burn another DVD image, and to my amazement it burns at 7.80x. So I burn another DVD image, with the same result, 7.80x. I figure it'll probably go back to 1.20x after a reboot, so I reboot to see what happens. I burn the same DVD iso as before, and it burns at 7.80x. Until I open Firefox to post this comment. I went back to check on the progress of the burn, and it's back to 1.20x. I had Firefox open during the previous burns, before I rebooted.

I don't understand how opening Firefox would have an effect on DVD burning speed.

Any explainations would be very welcome.

Well BigBopperCole, you're certainly making my brain hurt with this problem!

Did you try Kerry's suggestion above?

Here's another idea to see if we might be able to identify WHAT is causing the hangup. Can you reboot your system and check the dvd write speed. If it's 7.8x, then open a konsole and perform a "top" command. Make note of the various things at the top of the list. You don't need to stop it, just let it run.

Next, boot firefox. Check the top command again and see what's there now.

Next, try your dvd thing again. Check the top command again before you do any burning. Finally, try burning another dvd. Is it the slow speed?

Let us know if there are any "interesting" applications running. in the "top" display. If you think you can isolate it to a particular process that's taking too much RAM, CPU, hamsters, then you might be able to stop the process and have the dvd run at the higher speed. But let's see what's going on first.

I agree. This is "high-quality WTF"

Jon

You should try the disconnect reconnect thing. What i've found is some systems use the same irq for diffirent things, yours is proably on the same as your internet. when you disconnect and boot up with out it and reconnect and boot up, it will hopefully assighn a new irq.

I've tried Kerry's suggestion. Then copy a DVD image from a network drive to a local drive. Start burning the image, and it burns at 8.00x to 9.00x. I then start firefox, and it continues to burn at 9.00x to 10.00x. FYI - the burner is a 16x burner. I don't have any startup page configured, so when starting firefox it doesn't access the internet. I did use the network connection was used to copy the image from the network drive to the local drive. Once I accessed the internet, the speed promptly dropped to ~1.00x. I don't notice any odd processess that are different after accessing the internet. I think we're heading in the right direction, now just to narrow down what the process is that's causing the slowdown.

Thanks for all the help so far.

I have no more idea's on this one. Does this only happen with firefox open, have you tried with konqueror or opera? BigBopperCole, you know every time i read your problem i keep thinking of that joke, the one were the guy go's to the doctor's office and say's doctor: every time i do this it hurt's and the docter say's then don't do that.LOL. So if you don't open firefox at the same time your burning, do you still get that problem?

I used Jon Du Quesne's suggestion of the top command. The easiest way I could think of to share this info was screen shots, so here they are.

This was taken just after starting the pc. K3b, Gaim, Gimp are running, Gaim is logged in.

This is after starting a burn, burn running at 7.80x.

This was just after taking last screen shot, the burn slowed to 1.20x

kerry's last advice of not opening firefox at the same time as burning is not an option;) The problem is that once burning has slowed, it doesn't speed back up. The only time I've seen the speed go back to what it should be was when I burn the CD in the middle of some DVDs. Even then, I had firefox open the whole time, and once the speed returned, it stayed. Now, I've discovered that it isn't just firefox accessing the internet (remember, just having firefox open didn't cause a slowdown), that causes a problem. Taking that second screen shot slowed the burn process.

I hope the info I've provided now will help somebody to figure out this issue. I'm at a loss. It's not a general Linux issue either. I boot this same PC to Gentoo Linux, and I have no issues with DVD burning. It's a Mepis (perhaps Debian) issue.

I appreciate all the help so far.

Thanks,
Al
aka bigboppercole

Hey Al, we're going to have to ban you from this site if you don't start giving us easier problems to solve

Thanks for the screenshots of "top". What's irksome is that I can see that you have 512M RAM and a 2G swap area. But I don't see much usage of either one (the efficiency of Linux)!

Do you get similar results if you start up Opera rather than Firefox. I.e. does that initial connection to the Internet, irrespective of how you connect, have the same effect? I'm going to guess, "no".

Also, I find it interesting that you say, "...I've seen the speed go back to what it should be was when I burn the CD in the middle of some DVDs". So if you burn a DVD it's slow, then burn a CD, the CD burn speeds up, and you burn another DVD and the DVD is back up to 7.x???

I'm not a video card guy. There are others here with better experience in that area, but I'm wondering if it has something to do with the RAM on your video card. Could the system be trying to process the DVD stuff through the video (I'm really stretching here) and it's (the RAM or card) faulty and causing retries??

Do you have any spare hardware, either video card(s) or CD/DVD drives that you could swap the current one out, reboot your system with the "new" hardware, then swap it back out to install the "old" hardware? If so, what results do you get?

Remember, we're watching you. And unless you submit some easier questions like, "How do I log into Mepis as user demo?" we'll have to consider serious penalties

Jon

maybe, it's that the DMA is disabled.To enable it, just write in a terminal as root:
"hdparm -d1 /dev/hd*" where the '*' means the unit where wour writer is.
to make its run from the boot just create a file /etc/init.d/cdroms_dma and put this code into it.
########################################################################
#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/cdroms_dma
#

# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
start)
echo "Enable DMA for /dev/hda ..."
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda
sleep 1
echo "Enable DMA for /dev/hdb ..."
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdb
sleep 1
echo "Enable DMA for /dev/hdc ..."
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdc
sleep 1
echo "Enable DMA for /dev/hdd ..."
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdd
echo "DONE!"
;;
stop)
echo "Disable DMA for /dev/hda ..."
hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda
sleep 1
echo "Disable DMA for /dev/hdb ..."
hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdb
sleep 1
echo "Disable DMA for /dev/hdc ..."
hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdc
sleep 1
echo "Disable DMA for /dev/hdd ..."
hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdd
echo "DONE!"
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/cdroms_dma {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0
###################################################################
then make it executable:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/cdroms_dma
and finally put it in the boot sequence:
sudo update-rc.d cdroms_dma default

See you, guys.

Thanks gang, turns out I was having the same problem. My burner refused to go over 1.4x (ish)...turns out when I looked at the IDE channel in the device manager, PIO mode was enabled, after enabling DMA mode, I rebooted, Winxp put it back to PIO mode, so I uninstalled the IDE channel, and rebooted, when I went to look DMA mode was enabled, and now I burn at full speed (8X for the current media that I use)! Here I thought the burner was garbage! This DMA mode has also speeded up the access time when I put a CD or DVD into the HP DVD 740i by leaps and bounds...it used to practically freeze windows explorer...not anymore!

Turns out it sped up the other device on that channel too (my primary hard drive, wowzers, here I thought my WD Raptor SATA HD was a garbage technology!? it was just my DMA problem!).

Thanks gang

(this message is posted all over technical forums on the internet for the purpose of educating others out there about there DMA problems with their burners).

how much hard drive space do u have
u should about 20% free. also u should defragment it after u get the space freed up...

also close other processes while running it....

oh and u should also check for the latest drivers... to do this just go to google and type drive name and driver

k

Happy buring

But this aint windoze were talkin about here!

jim

See this post for a more in-depth solution near the bottom.

http://www.mepis.org/node/10421

Mike P

Thanks Jim. You took the words out of my mouth

Jon

Well, I'm currently running on windows and I have the same problem, so I was searching the web and came upon this thread. I just have a quick question, How do I access a terminal?

You did read the forum rules, I hope?

We charge for fixing windoze.

My occupation?
Well, computer geek-stuff, mostly. I could tell you all about it; but, then I would have to delete you.

I had major issues with my optical drive being slower than a wet week on an otherwise rather fast laptop. Yours may not be a laptop, but one or two of the fixes I used may be of assistance.

First - more of a test than anything else, set the read-ahead value to 8 before burning a dvd. In a terminal, type as root

hdparm -c1 -d1 -a8 -u1 -k /dev/hdc

Replace /hdc with whatever your drive is. The reason I call this a test is because the setting will be lost as you reboot.

If that helps, then your issue is probably (or or at least partly) due to lack of DMA, but you will already know that if you see some reference like "dma not permitted" in the terminal output of the command. Your system may not be capable of using dma for the optical drive (like mine) but if setting the read-ahead helps, you might try adding

hdc=noprobe

to the end of your /boot/grub/menu.list line for booting mepis.

--------

Next option is to check your kernel version with

uname -r

If yours is the 2.6.15-26-386, you could try the installing the 2.6.15-27-386 smp (symmetric multiple processors) enabled kernel. The only real difference is the 27 tricks the kernel into thinking there are 2 processors and the system is able to make better use of multi-threaded cpus, but using the 386 kernels may not be sufficient to fix your problems.

On my system, when I was running the 26-386 and the 27-386 kernels, if I was playing some music while opening and closing programs, the sound output would stop dead while the cpu was being utilised and carry on when it freed up, but when I switched to the 27-686 kernel, instead of stopping when the cpu was working, I would get a few blips, much better than total silence, and that was my deciding factor. The 686 kernel is not great, but it is better for me and maybe it could be an option for you.

If you want to try the 686 kernel, search for 26-386 (if that's your running kernel) in synaptic, note down all the installed packages, then search again for 27-686 and select the ones that correspond with the results of the first search for installation. One word of warning - you can not have more than one intel modem package, it must be one or the other, so if you use your modem and you want to use the 686 kernel, mark the 386 version for removal and the 686 version for installation. I don't use my modem, but doing this actually made my laptop modem work properly, whereas with the 368 version it would not work.

If you have an nvidia or ati card, you'll need to disable the driver before restarting with a different kernel, then mark it for re-installation in synaptic it after you have successfully booted the 686 kernel so that it picks up the right settings and dependencies.

When you're done, before you restart, you'll have to edit your /boot/grub/menu.list by copying and pasting the 4 lines associated with your current running 386 kernel, then changing all references from 386 to 686 in the copied block (leave the original block as it is), saving the file and rebooting, then choosing the 686 option during boot.

That's alot to digest and work through, but somewhere and/or somehow, I hope it will point you in the right direction.

Happy Christams

Mike P

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