i thought i was upgrading by buying a dvd burner, but after looking into all of this, (after i bought it of course). it seems that cd burning was easier and cheaper. i could put 1hr 20min on a cd, where as i've read on here that only one hr. should be used on a dvd for good quality, no gain. cd software was easier and didn't affect my puter. and burning in ten minutes compared to 1hr minimum. cd's are cheaper, and they work on my dvd player. other than possibly having to put a 2hr movie onto to disc's , can someone tell me the benefits. signed the angry fireman

The quality of any video that you put on a DVD will far surpass the quality of anything you burn on a CD.

If you're comparing a VCD to a DVD for video quality, you're definitely talking apples and oranges. Even if you go to putting 2 hours onto a DVD, the quality will be far better than what you got on your VCD with much better resolution. VCD resolution is 320x254? DVD is 720x480.

However, yes, it takes a lot more processing power to deal with DVD qualty than with VCD.

Does that help?

i'm just getting frustrated. my burner came with nero dvd software, which was burning at what i call real time (it took as long to burn as the was long. so thinking some other software would be better, i bought emc8 and it takes even longer, and between the two of them i still havent produced a playable dvd.

Does the idea of faster-than-real-time production sound interesting to you? How about the idea of near-DVD quality for those things that might not be DVD-quality resolution to begin with (such as VCR transfers, VCD-to-DVD transfers, video captures from PVRs, or lower-res AVI-to-disc transfers)? If so, then you might want to check out this thread:

http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?showtopic=5920

As I indicate in that thread, I transferred 1 hour and 43 minutes' worth of programming (103 minutes) to DVD at "half-D1" resolution (which is 352x480, compared to the 720x480 "full-D1" resolution which is equal to the full-quality DVD standard), and it only took me a total of 91 minutes to create a usable DVD -- I started with AVI captures of several TV shows and did the necessary DVD-compliant MPEG encoding using an external tool (not using EMC8 for encoding), set EMC8 to create an ISO of my project WITHOUT re-encoding the MPEG files, then burned the ISO to disk using EMC8, then popped the resultant DVD in my set-top player and enjoyed the show.

No muss, no fuss, but there is some learning curve required -- see my post in the link above for full details. FYI, you could probably use the same method I describe to produce projects using your original Nero software, but you'd have to figure out how to get it to use your encoded MPEG files without trying to re-encode them to "full" DVD resolution (720x480).

i have read your thread, and i printed it out today, it seems very useful, i tried it yesterday from memory only(mine that is) i must have done something wrong, because when i tried to burn, it said the file was bigger than the dvd would allow. i printed it out today, and will try again when i get home. also is it just me, or does roxio seem to take over the puter functions, i noticed some task bar icons disappeared and don't come back on reboot. and in general its just running slower. just venting!

A couple of things come to mind here if you're DVD burner is writing slow, but first, does it also run slowly if you just burn a Data DVD? If you write 4.3GB of data, does it take an hour? If so, then you should check to make sure that DMA is enabled for your drive. Find that in the hardware settings for your drive. Also, and maybe even more importantly, check for newer firmware for your drive. Even if you just got it, there very well may be two or three newer versions available. That made a huge difference on my burning. I could barely get it to sustain a bit over 2X writing when I first installed it. Now 8X holds pretty rock solid. You can also try some different brands and varieties of discs. Try "+" discs if you're using "-" or vice versa, assuming your drive supports both.

If you're burning a video DVD, and you haven't got the data in an ISO format, or as a set of files that don't need to be re-encoded or rendered, then it will take a long time to do the rendering/encoding.

Hope that helps!

thanks dave i will give it a try