Does anyone have any ideas on why my encoding speeds could have gone from about 30 to 40 minutes for a movie to about 8 hrs. The only background is that after recieving power calibration errors with my NEC1300A burner and being restricted to burning at 2 times rather than 4, I decided to reinstall the burner and updated the firmware (Herries 1.0A). I also reinstalled Nero and DVD Shrink. Now I can still only burn at 2 times and the the encoding process has become ridiculously slow. Any ideas?
keeping it defraged will help encoding speeds but not sure on why burner wont got to 4x unless its incompatable media.
hi Bolitar Check the IDE channels in device manager. Be sure that data is transfered using DMA not PIO. Check the primary and secondary channels:http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx May be why, your encode times slowed down,after you get a few errors it switches to pio. good luck and welcome to the forum jim
Bolitar My first choice is the same as jim_dandy's make your CPU do the work and somethings going to get tired, check your DMA settings. Hmm! A defrag wouldn't hurt either.
Thanks for the replys, I am running on Windows 98 and as far as I can tell DMA is enabled. The settings in the device manager has the option of DMA checked. The other options checked are Disconnect and Auto Insert Notification. I have also done a defrag quite recently. Is there anything to be gained by physically disconnecting the burner (ie pulling out the cables) and then reconnecting. The media I have been using has been consistent all the way through.
Hi Sophocles, No nothing new. Operating system - Windows 98 480MB RAM Processor AMD XP 2000+ 40Gb Hard drive (75% free) NEC ND1300-A burner, Firmware 1.0A Nero Express 6 (bundled with burner) DVD Shrink 3.2 Something I`ve done has somehow screwed something up, because I have done plenty of successful backups previously in much faster time with all the same stuff and burnt at 4 times. I don`t quite understand the advice about DMA mode. In the Device manager, the burner is listed under the CDROM and has the option DMA checked. There is no mention of PIO as far as I can see. The primary and secondary IDE controllers are listed under Hard Disk Controllers and don`t seem to mention DMA anywhere. The device manager does list a problem with the Parallel Port Host Adapter under SCSI Controllers. Does this have anything to do with the price of eggs? Another weird thing is I got radically different encoding times with 2 backups today. Mystic River took about 9hrs. Haunted Mansion took about 2hrs (both movies only) I was previously used to it taking about 30 to 40 mins. Any ideas appreciated.
You may have a problem with your ASPI layer. Go to this and download forceaspi 1.8. Follow the instructions. The site is up and down and right now its up. http://forceaspi18.w.interia.pl/
Here is some more information about DMA on Windows 98. http://www.windows-help.net/windows98/tune-35.shtml
Following earlier advice I have defragged, updated my firmware (1.0A), installed a new ASPI layer (ForceASPI 1.8),and confirmed that the DMA is functioning. Unfortunately, there has been no improvement. I`m at desperation stage now and wonder if anyone has any other ideas. I`m wondering whether there could be a problem with the the writer (hardware). I`m not sure whether this has any relevance but the speed (or lack of) seems dependant on the amount of compression. A movie not requiring compression might take 1.5 to 2 hrs, whereas a movie compressed to 70% could take 8-9 hrs. Does this mean anything? Any help would be appreciated. A new burner or a trip to the PC repair shop seem to be my next options.
Hi Bolitar, I just read you posts from top to bottom. Seems your problem started after your firmware update. Looks to me like you got a bad update. Can you flash back to an earlier version or download the one you have and flash it again? Thats what it looks like to me. Your excessive times started after the last firmware flash. Jerry
No luck unfortunately - I have flashed the original firmware (1.08) but no improvement. Your suggestion got me thinking though, Jerry. I have a suspicion that when I did the inital flashing (it was a fair while back now), I was confronted with a whole lot of different options, and not really knowing what I was doing took a bit of a punt on which one sounded the best. Is it possible that flashing an incorrect firmware could have buggered up the writer, so that even though the correct one was installed later, the damage was permanent? Does it make sense that the outcome of this could be that everything still works, but is super slow? If yes, what is my next option - a new writer?
I had the same problem. I cleaned out my c:\windows\prefetch folder. That helped me, maybe it will help you.
Hi Panchov, What is the c:\windows\prefetch folder? I don`t seem to have one. Is it something you`ve created or is it part of the system? I`m using Windows 98 and wonder if there`s an equivalent on my system.
Try the firmware from this site. Make sure its the right one for your drive. Download DVDinfopro to get all the information on your drive that you need. Firmware: http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?download_id=1517 DVDinfopro from: http://www.dvdinfopro.com. You could have the wrong firmware installed. Jerry
Thanks Jerry, My firmware checked out OK. I even tried the latest version (1.0B) and still no luck. My concern is what I may have done to the drive in my bungled attempts at the original flashing. Is there any way of finding out whether this is the case. The DVdInfoPro seems to give a wealth of information. Can this be used to see if I have stuffed anything up?
Success!!!! Thanks go to Fasfrank. While researching a different but related matter, Fasfrank suggested it was a good idea to get rid of a nasty little program called InCD. I vaguely remembered seeing this name, so i thought I`d give it a go. A cleaning tool is available from: http://nero.com/us/631938356101755.html I don`t know where it came from or what it did, but now it`s gone and I`m back to decoding at normal speeds. I would strongly recommend to anyone who is experiencing big slowdowns in encoding times to give this a try.
