DVD burner I finally ordered. It's a Super Writemaster branded burner.
After a brief install in my mom's Dell, I knew it at least worked a read
CDs. Now it was time to test it as a DVD burner.
I arranged DVD Flick to make a disk with 2 24-minute episodes and then a
short clip after that. I set it up to use my 16G thumbdrive as an
external "scratchpad" drive as I had envisioned. While DVD Flick bitched
at me because the 16G Cruzer was Fat32 and therefore limited in the size
of the files it was to create (claiming some files might get as big as
2Gigs), I still had it go ahead and use it.
The program went through and created what I asked it to do. The longest
steps were encoding the video and then combining sources. After the
sources were combined, it just needed to copy the files over into DVD
naming structure.
For what I had it work on, it took about 3 hours, and that wasn't a full
disk of 4 or 5 episodes. I know the processor on this P4 tower is kinda
slow, but I didn't think it was THAT slow. The thumbdrive could be the
bottleneck in the process. I should look at the comparative data speeds
of a high speed 2.0 thumbdrive compared to the IDE Seagate hard drive.
It might be a good idea to maybe get a 2nd HD in there just for using as
a DVD Flick scratchpad, as I call it.
Oh yeah, about the tower. During install, I had to move the included CD
burner to another bay in the case. I noticed it was also set to Cable
Select. Who the hell keeps doing that? You can't use Cable Select unless
you have the special cable made for that, which would have holes punched
in the ribbon cable on the Drive Select wires. My burner went in set to
Master and plugged into the end of the ribbon cable on that channel (IDE
cable ends need to be terminated anyway), and while I can plug in the CD
burner as Slave, there's an issue with power plugs. I need to get a
Y-shapted extender cable. It seems whoever put together this tower used
a power supply with really short 4-wire power plugs.
Anywho, DVD Flick finishes making the files. I load up my burning
program. Even though I have the speed set to 4X, it takes only 5 minutes
to burn what I asked for, which is about right since a full disk would
be about 10 to 13 minutes. I'll check it soon for errors.
Also, I finally got to see my imported HK DVD of the 2nd Cardcaptor
Sakura movie in widescreen aspect for the first time! I bought that at
Anime North in 2001, if I remember right. I would like to rip the video
off the disk, extract the subtitles, and fix the aspect ratio of the
video to play on regular TVs.
And now I'm looking for the data DVD some guy wrote out for me a while
back, instead of the CD I hoped he would have done.
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