First Attempt at burning - HELP!

[ybf_dvd]

I made my first attempting at burning a DVD last night and need some help in getting things figured out in my head.

DVD Drive: NEC ND-2500A
Media: Memorex DVD-R
Ripper: DVD Shrink
Burner: BurnAtOnce 0.99b
OS: Windows ME
Memory: 256MB

I am new at this, so please bear with me and help if you can.

I ripped my DVD to the HD. Everything appears to have worked just fine. It took 4hrs. 13mins., but it worked. I now have the VIDEO_TS, etc., folders in place on my HD. I tried to use ImgTool to burn, and kept getting permission errors, etc. I then switched to using BurnAtOnce. I let it run through the night last night, and when I got up this morning I had an error dialogue: VSMON has caused an error in VSMON.EXE... And, then DVD had ejected. I look over the log in BurnAtOnce and everything appeared okay. However, the progress bar only made it half way and the status field reports "Wrote 2043 of 4464 MB (Buffer 99%).

I have verified that I can read the DVD, but I get to a point a little over half way through the movie and the player freezes up. I assume this means the burn wasn't successful. Did I just create my first coaster???

Hopefully someone can shed some light on the subject. Did I do something wrong? Did I miss a step? I thought DVD Burning would be easy, this stuff is very involved and gets confusing.

[ybf_dvd]

I just noticed in the log that there is one line that says:

Total of 85 possible drive buffer underruns predicted.

What does this mean? Does this indicate a problem? It was also trying to write at 4x:

Starting to write CD/DVD at speed 4 in real SAO mode for single Session.

[tigerman8u]

4 hours and 13 minutes is way to long. A straight D-5 dvd with no compression takes me app. 10 minutes to rip with Dvdshrink. A D-9 (3hour movie) took me 72 minutes. I would start with a dfrag of your hard drive.

[kuneo]

Overnight!!!!! No Way!!

When you get it all set up right-the times will be:::

DVD Shrinking to Hard Drive-approx 30min or less (depends on length of movie and extra's).

Burning from HD to Disc (burner) approx 30 mins for 2x media or 15mins for 4x media.

Most people use DVD Shrink to copy to HD,and Nero to interface with your burner-to burn.

Memorex media is supposed to be crap for blank's,and I ain't too sure about Burn at Once either.

Hopefully you can switch to Nero,and get those times down.

Get some better blank DVD's too,and make sure they're rated 2x or 4x,and compatable with your burner at those speeds.

It will get better-Hang in.

Good Luck

K

[lgha]

Check your dvd drive to be sure it's in DMA mode. Can you view the movie from your HD with PowerDVD or similer PC player? Do check this fourm for DVDShrink, it really is a good piece of free sw and if you have Nero you may be able to save the movie that's on your HD. Is your dvd drive and HD on the same IDE chain? Your close to burning dvds so don't give up.

[ybf_dvd]

All: Thanks for the posts.

Over the weekend I actually got a burn to work. I had one person tell me that you can't burn under WinME. That is obviously not true. Prior to reading up on my thread this is what I did. Since I already have my Rip to the HD, I used ImgTool to create an ISO file. That took about 43 minutes. After that, I used DVD Decrypter to burn it. It took about 30-45 minutes, but it worked.

tigerman8u: I agree that I should defrag my HD, I've just been leary of anything like that because my system has never felt that stable under WinME.

kuneo: Since my burn worked, I will probably keep my media since the spindle is already open.

Igha: Yes, I can view the entire movie from my HD. My HD is on its own IDE. I have read a little about DMA, but was hesitant to making that change. Every time I change something of that nature, it seems like things start to go wrong. I will look into it.

Thanks again, all of your information is very helpfull.

[ormonde]

To ybf_dvd:

What is your CPU speed, and do you have any other programs running in the background?

[ybf_dvd]

ormonde:

CPU Speed: Celeron 700

I try to shut down as much as I can. I should have mentioned in my previous post, that I disconnected my internet connection, disabled ZoneAlarm, disabled Norton AntiVirus and LiveUpdate, and shut down anything else that I could from the Task Bar.

[ormonde]

"CPU Speed: Celeron 700"

That should be equivalent to a Pentium III, right? I believe you would see better results if you had a faster processor. (1 GHz or better).

[ybf_dvd]

Yeah, but wife wont allow me to spend any more money, so I'm sort of stuck with what I have for a while. Ideally I'd love to have a GB or higher CPU with a GB or so of memory as well.