[The Virus]

I have a 17inch MacBook Pro and I have been using Toast 7.1. However after the first several discs, I noticed a slow down in the burning time. I used to be able to burn movies in around 10-12 minutes at what I can only assume was 8x (I have an 8X Superdrive) Now for some reason I am only able to burn at 2X (best option before burning) and a dvd now takes around 25 minutes to burn. Does anyone know what could have caused this, especially since it was working before? I have always burned on the DVD-R formats. Also don't think the drive is faulty since it burns CD-Rs etc at the full capacity. Any help would be appreciated.

[tsantee]

When you insert the blank DVD the drive's firmware checks the media to determine what burn speeds are supported. That info is passed on to Toast so that the burn speeds listed in bold face are supported. You might try a different brand of quality media to see if those are better supported by the drive.

If the drive does show 8X speed supported with the selected media but burning is much slower then that is due to two things. One is that the burn speed with all drives and all media varies depending on what part of the disc is being burned. The beginning (inner) part of the disc is burned slower than the ending (outer) part. The other is that buffer underrun protection is slowing down the burn to prevent errors or a failed burn. This can be for many reasons but a common one is slight incompatibility between the drive's firmware and the media.