I have a liteon 16x writer, and for some reason it takes like 15 mins to burn a dvd. I've checked all settings, played with the buffer.. manually set the burn speed to 16x. Run it as root. When it burns it says "writing at 16x" but down below it shows the actual burn speeds to be more like 6x.

plz help cuz I really have a lot of burning to do, I just picked up an LG divx console player. w00t

Some DVD/RW's only work at the rated speed under Windows. This is because Microsoft writes a special driver and puts it in Windows, or on Windows update. I have a 16x DVD/RW that now burns at about 8x. When I first got it it only burned at 4x. But, I run cutting edge distros, so the DVD support gets a little better with each release DVD-tools and cdrecord. You have to wait a littel while for linux to catch up with the latest and greatest things. Someday I'll get 16x out of it. Also, DVD + R's burn the fastest. DVD/RW's burn considerably slower.

It might be a DMA problem install hdparm then use hdparm /dev/hd? replacing the question with the drive letter of the burner if it is not set then hdparm -d1 /dev/hd? and check to see if it helps. If it does to make it take effect every boot in Debian you edit the file /etc/hdparm.conf putting in the proper settings or you can always put it in some script that gets run at boot, You can also recompile your kernel selecting CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO=y and related settings.