DVD burner not burning like it used to?

Discussion in 'The Digital Darkroom' started by mPower, Apr 9, 2008.

  1. mPower

    mPower Member

    Well...mine isn't, it's slllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwww...and I found out why!

    I recently ran out of my Sony DVD-Rs (17" PowerBook G4, among others) which had been zipping along nicely at 8x burns. I went to OfficeMax and purchased some Memorex 16x DVD-Rs...and as Emeril says, BAM! Down to 2x max!

    I have come to find out that it is indeed the media that is the problem. If you have a Mac running OS X, open a Terminal window with a piece of blank media in the drive. Type 'drutil status' and you'll be presented with several items, two of which are important:

    First, notice the 'Cur Write' and 'Max Write' values. Secondly notice the 'Media ID'.

    There is nothing you can do to change the values of the 'Cur/max' write. It is what it is (with that said, I'm sure some enterprising person will find the file that must define what the values are based on the Media ID, and hack it).

    The important thing here becomes the 'Media ID'. Check out this site: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

    Here you'll notice that the Memorex I have (RITEKF1) is in the '2nd Class Media' section, and the Sony (my last one!) is in the '1st Class Media' section.

    For whatever it's worth (and your millage may vary), when I stick to media in the 1st class section, I burn at max rates. Lately, that's been TDK and Sony.

    Hope this helps someone out there!

    Cheers,

    Mark

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  2. PolynesianMedic

    PolynesianMedic Global Moderator Staff Member

    Interesting info, I wonder if this holds true for Vista machines also.
     
  3. mPower

    mPower Member

  4. Roger

    Roger Member Staff Member

    ROFL!
     
  5. DisneyGeek92

    DisneyGeek92 Member

    You shouldn't run vista you should get a mac. Just kidding but I got to use a mac mini today on a freakin' huge monitor today and it was awesome.
     
  6. Roger

    Roger Member Staff Member

    Hey, I'm using a small spindle of Fujifilm DVD-R, and it's the same MediaID, but I've got speeds of 2x, 4x, 6x and 8x listed, but the vendor is different than yours. Interesting.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 11, 2014
  7. mPower

    mPower Member

    Very interesting. Could also be associated with the type of drive perhaps?
     
  8. Roger

    Roger Member Staff Member

    Perhaps it could also be PowerPC v Intel as well.
     
  9. mPower

    mPower Member

    Hmmm, that I know for sure it is not. Tried it on the quad core at home with the same results.
     

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