Hi lastguyonthenet
you set the CD-DVD Speed scan speed in the box below "settings". In the image below, you can see that it's set to 8x. Once you set it, it'll hang on to that default speed until you change it again. In the image below, I have a disc that I burned in the "Create Disc" test, so you can see the pattern of write speeds the burner used. In this case it was my Lite-On, using "Smartburn", hence the speed pattern - and if you look carefully, you may see that it was a failed burn - the disc was never closed!
It's odd, though. Your scans suggest that CD-DVD Speed was set to scan at maximum speed, yet the indicated speed looks like it was set to 8x, and confirmed by the three figures you quoted, which are the scan speed at the end of the test of 8.29x, 8.04x and 7.48x. Therefore when you set it to scan at 8x, it might not make much difference. Bit of a mystery, that one!
As for burn times - some burners are just quicker than others. I find that using 12x instead of 16x on my Pioneer only results in the burn taking a few seconds longer.
As for getting the best results, I think you'll need to experiment a bit. Intuitively, it might seem that burning at a slower speed will result in better write quality - and that is certainly the popular belief on a video editing forum to which I subscribe. From my own tests, however, I find that there isn't any simple relationship between slower burns and increasing write quality.
For example, I wrote to a cheap Verbatim knock-off Dynex disc with my LG at 18x - but the speed dropped as the drive struggled with the media, and write quality was pretty mediocre. The burn was completed in 5:38. I decided to try an 8x burn - and the write speed looked nice and consistent, but the resulting write quality scans were worse, and the burn took 9:02.
By what you say, you are always using verification of your data. Whilst I would not discourage you from doing that with your data discs, where you might wish to feel reassured that the data is safely on disc prior to say deleting the source material from your hard drive, for video I would suggest you use CD-DVD Speed to write an ISO image file to the disc in the "Create Disc" test. You then get to see what your burner is getting up to as it writes, and you don't really need to do write verification. In the same time it takes to verify the disc in Nero or whatever burning program you're using, you could run a CD-DVD Speed scan!
As for Solidburn and WOPC - you can try enabling or disabling those and see how it affects your write quality, if you have the time to run the scans and the discs to spare. For your three posted scans, you stated that you had Solidburn
On, but since, as you say, the DW1655 firmware probably recognises the media your using, you should try it
Off. Do you have QSuite installed?
I don't think that writing DVD-Video material is any different from writing data, in terms of write speed. There's no reason it should be - it's all just binary data after all.
I thought that Moser Baer had a pretty good reputation, and I would imagine that media made in India should be pretty good when stacked up against Chinese and Taiwanese stuff. Your third scan, although only using 3.4GB of the disc didn't look too bad, and you certainly shouldn't have any problems playing the disc - it's well within acceptable limits of errors, plus you've scanned it at maximum rather than 8x, so it might be overstating errors. Although BenQ drives are popular as scanners, I believe they can give conservative results.
All my burners seem to give better results for +R media, so perhaps you could also try some +R variants of your own discs.
I hope you can resist building up a whole menagerie of burners! I'm trying to tell myself that I have enough now! I feel drawn to the media sections of my local stores, however, on the lookout for media I haven't yet tried. Mind you, at least I have no inclination to start using or testing DL media! And just think what things would be like with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray!!!
Happy scans!
KHypermedia 8x4x12 (BenQ 800 clone) B2L7 BenQ DW1655 BCIB BenQ DW1650 BCIC Samsung SH-S182M KC03 LG GSA-H22N 1:01 TDB Lite-On SHM-165H6S HS0E Pioneer DVR-111D 1.29
by ItalianJob on Sat Feb 17, 2007 6:57 pm 
Did you eject before scanning ?
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