Say if I want to burn a film or something to dvd. If I burn at a slower speed does this make the quality better? What exactly do slower burn speeds do?
Well it really depends on the media u use and what the top rated speed of the media is. But a good rule is burn half of what the top rated speed is. If u use crap media than i would suggest burning at 4x I use Verbs -R 16x and burn them at 8x, also i use TYs -R 8x burn them at 6x just because they TYs
I would recommend experimenting a bit with burn speeds. I just got a new 18X LiteOn drive and use Verbatim 16X dvd+r's and found that 4X gave the best quality burn (98%), followed by 8X (85%).
Burning at a slower speed reduces the power requirements of the recording laser and widens the power band of a medium. Slowing down the drive also puts less pressure on the drive bearings and optical pickup sled that is moving the objective lens. Since the force increases in proportion to the square of the angular velocity (the rotational speed of the medium), higher speeds mean more force and less tolerance for overcoming flaws. That's why PIE and PIF errors usually look better at slower speeds. However, jitter sometimes increases because the pit marks are overburned if the dye sensitivity of a high speed disc is greater than that allowed by the longer recording time at a slower speed. In these cases, the initial PIE errors look great but the discs will fail sooner because the mark formation is not accurate. Half the rated speed is a conservative rule of thumb. Recording 16X media at 4X, though, may be asking for trouble down the line if the drive manufacturer has been sloppy in firmware for slower speeds.
I see this 6X burning mentioned occasionally. How is this possible? In Nero there is no 6X listed and although in ImgBurn or Decrypter 6X can be chosen, the actual burning is at 4X.
