Hi-tech discussion on slow DVD ripping speeds

where can i check to see if im using the same channel?

 

Look in My computer's properties (Device Manager). Under my computer, find IDE Controller. Under IDE controller will be a primary and secondary channel. The same place you found where to switch PIO to DMA if available.

Each channel can operate one of two drives at a time with no interruption. If it tries to operate two drives at the same time (IE: you have both dvd drives on your secondary ide channel, and try to rip 2 movies at once), then each drive will take turns accessing the motherboard thru that channel.

For example, I wanted to rip 2 movies at once, so I have my 2 hard drives on the primery IDE channel. And I have one dvd drive on my secondary channel in the first slot. The second slot stays empty. My other DVD drive is on a PCI IDE controller card all by itself. That way, I can have both drives ripping at full speed. I tried it before with both drives on the mobo's secondary channel, it the drives took turns accessing the motherboard. Consider it like a 2-lane highway with 2 cars in each lane, but one car always has to be first (although they can take turns at whose first).

 

With DVD Decrypter and my LG DVD buner GS4040B with new firmware (and old firmware) used to rip at aroun 5x, my liteon dvd rom used to rip at around 8-10x, not both struggle at around 1.2x - i've changed firmware a few times but both have worked cool and dandy afterwards, i've increased my RAM, but i dont see a direct connection to the sudden lack of speed - any ideas?

What used to take 10-15 mins is now taking over an hour - if i run both at once though it doesnt slow any further (thankfully)

 

Drastic,

I had a LG dvd-rom/CD burner, and I currently have a Lite-on dvd-rom (and a Plextor PX712A). I had similar results. Average dual-layer movies used to rip slowly, with my LG averaging around 5-7X. My Lite-on is usually around 8-10 on dual layers. Plextor slightly higher than that. A sudden drop to 1.2X with all brands surely indicates a problem other than your hardware. Ram wouldn't make it drop that much either, or at least not if you were ripping faster before.

I would check first to make sure your BIOS and your IDE controller settings are set to DMA if available. (See some of the posts above on that). Some BIOS's have DMA settings as well that should be checked. I hear Windows XP sometimes has problems with DMA switching back to PIO, although I haven't experienced that myself. Some guys say you have to uninstall and reinstall the IDE controller. If you're unfamiliar with that, most motherboards have IDE controllers built in to the mobo. Check out your computer properties and you should see a controller that if you look at, will have primary and secondary channels.

Also don't forget if you've done some recent drive switching to make sure you have the master/slave settings right on the back of the drives.

If none of that pans out, I would check out your ASPI layers. Adaptec is my choice for getting those. They are a pain in the butt to play with, but are quite necessary it seems with regards to burning drives. There is a check tool that adaptec has to tell you which layers are installed. Often 2 of the 4 are not installed at all, from what I've seen. And that seems to screw things up with burning.

Some dvd-roms seem to be locked at a low speed, usually 2X or so. More often, it's burners that are locked actually. Not rom-onlys. If that's the case, it shoudl rip uncopyrighted movies fast, and copyrighted ones slow. Hacked firmware will cure that problem. Hope this helps.

 

I would assume that the compression is the bottleneck here. If you have a single layer DVD, then it's a one to one copy, so no compression has to be done; it'll fit on a blank DVD. But if it's two layer, then no matter what, compression has to kick in and that's CPU (math) intensive. Am I wrong here? I'm not sure more RAM will help either, because if you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and bring up task manager when ripping, you'll see that Mem usage is never nearly as much as the physical RAM (if you have 512 meg).

If you want to play big leagues with multiple burning, your looking for 1 or more Intel Xeon Processors or equivalent AMD processor capable motherboards with an ultra fast wide drive (10000-15000 rpm) and the 512meg of matching RAM. Plus, if you have an SCSI hard drive, then you can afford to put one DVD-ROM on each IDE channel. Some of the newer motherboards will have SCSI controllers built right in such as those from Intel and Supermicro and several others. Things will fly with that setup since encoding needs a lot of processor horsepower...

 

Upahill,

He is having a problem with ripping, not burning. You're right, burning (or actually encoding with compression) is very processor intensive. But he seems to be talking about just ripping on a computer that used to work fine. My money's on the DMA settings.

Only other thing that comes to mind is that he's used to ripping non-copyrighted movies, and this is the first protected one. Or that he changed DVD drives or firmware.

 

Hi there,
i have a pioneer DVR-A06 DVD-Burner and an Artec 16x DVD-Rom. So far so good, but now i have this speed issue for a long time now and still can't figure it out. The first thing is when ripping DVD's with either one of the Drives, the Speed is nailed to 2x, which may be because of the Firmware Restriction, but it apllies to Protected and Unprotected Discs. The Second and bigger Problem is that may 4x DVD burner used with 4x Media takes almost 45 Minutes to complete a Disc, which is really annoying after a while. Both drives are set to multiword dma mode 2 and I'm using the Adaptec Aspi 4.60. First Ide Channel hosts 2 hdd's and the second Ide Channel hosts the 2 Drives with the Burner as Master and the DVD as slave. I tried everything, from 2 different 80 Wire Cables to using only the Burner or switching the DVD-Rom to Master and the Burner to Slave. Nothing helped. I use an Gigabyte GA8-KNXP (REv. 1.0) Mobo and looked up the Manual today if there is an Option for DMA Enabling or something like that. But the Bios hasn't such an Option. If anyone of you has a Clue or at least a small hint please help. Thanks and I#m sorry if there are critical writing mistakes =)

 

have you tried uninstalling the controller and letting windows reinstall it to see if that helps ?
the reason i say this is because after i think 6 or more errors windows will slow the ide channel down . i understand that it is dma mode and not pio mode . i had this problem also . uninstalling the ide channel and letting windows reinstall it may help you with this . make sure after windows reinstalls the ide channel that it is in dma mode . hope this helps

 

I agree. Reinstalling the secondary channel and resetting to DMA again would probably go far. Getting hacked firmware for both drives would probably help. Do you have a 2X lock on both drives??

I had an Artec 16X rom and it was one of the slowest rippers I tried. However, it was faster than that! Perhaps 5X - 6X if memory serves right. Burner on primary, Rom on secondary is correct. Make sure you're not trying to use both drives at once, or they'll basically take turns accessing the mobo, slowing rip speeds.

The cables made no difference with my setup either. The ribbon types are capable of faster speeds than the drive is to begin with, so no bottleneck there. There are some newer ASPI layers available, though I seriously doubt that's you're bottleneck. Play with reinstalling. Make sure the jumpers are set correct. If both drives are doing it, its likely in the computer (windows) and not the drive. Good luck.

 

Luck is indeed what i need , tried reinstalling the second IDE channel the last time after i installed temporarily another HDD to the second IDE channel, Windows changed the mode to PIO and when i wanted to reinstall the IDE channel, windows said that there were no drivers for that kind of stuff. Well thnx Uncle Bill but how crappy is that. Well i think i'll gice it a try after finishing my actual bunch of dvds. I have an Image of my OS on DVD so if it f***s up i can reestablish my current state without to much effort.
Well we'll see =)
OllAH

 

Try uninstalling the whole controller and reinstalling and setting to DMA. Also make sure you have all the windows updates, and the firmware and drivers are updated for your motherboard, as the controllers are probably built-in to the mobo.

If it locks at exactly 2.0X, I would think that would almost have to indicate a firmware lock problem. Or that your ripping software is programmed too slow on the read-speed. Try DVD decrypter and see what kind of rip speeds you get, and if the buffer is filling up. That should help point you in the right direction. Buffer full would indicate a hard drive problem, such as too slow or too full. If your HD is close to maxed out or its fragged bad, it could be that it cant find a place to write to fast enough.
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