DVDs only burn at 1/4 the speed that they are set to burn in K3B

Setup:
NEC 3550A CD/DVD writer
Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy)
K3b
(all SW updated via repositories today)

Background:
- burn speed set to 16x, actually burns between 2.5-4.0x (confirmed both on the realtime display in K3b and by calculating the total burn time)
- burning DVD-R at 16x works flawlessly on this media using Nero/RecordNowMax in WXP
- K3B correctly identifies max burning speed of media
- no errors on K3B log
- hdparm output:
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
- the above demonstrates that DMA & 32-bit are enabled
- hdparm -I shows that UDMA2 / PIO4 are supported and UDMA2 is currently active

Questions:

- As so many others have asked, why is growifs burning slow when the obvious issues (e.g. DMA=on) have been addressed

- Is there a problem with the implementation of growifs? (this has been alluded to by others)

- Do I need to update the firmware of the 3550A for linux software to recognize its burn speed?

- Most hdparm commands require root access. Does this mean I have to run K3B from root?

- I've read that SCSI emulation is not a required solution for recent kernels. Do I need to use SCSI emulation?


Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

It does not matter what the vendor says the speed the burner can burn. The vendor knows you are addicted to speed, and will tell you what you want to hear. The burning application looks at it differently, if you want a quality burn job, the best job will be burned at 4x or slower depending on the quality of the equipment used.

I have a "rated" 16x DVD burner, but my favorite buning app won't go over 4x no matter what I tell it to do, because I don't know better.

EDIT: That's with Nero 7 Premium in my case. I can burn a DVD movie at 16x where the source files originally came from CD's, but not for a DVD image file, that's burned at 4x.

Duh, sometimes you have to put things down in writing to figure it out.

Yes, it appears that you have to run K3B as root to get it to burn at full speed. This likely has to do with some application somewhere along the burning path requiring root privileges to know what the burner's true speed is.

So I just put 'gksudo k3b' in my icewin menu, and everything works great now. One more step away from getting rid of M$.


Junior Hacker, thank you for the prompt response. I understand your frustration with corporate greed. However, you _should_ be observing 16x burning speed (or whatever your max is) when reaching the end of the burn. If not, there is definitely something wrong with your setup and you are loosing out on the money you spent for your rated 16x burner. I have always been able to get my burners to reach max speed with great reliability on good quality media.

That's probably the difference, I prefer slower speed for maximum efficiency, but I don't use quality media.