Is my PC up to par for DVD burning? (1 Viewer)

[Justin Ward]

I currently have a P3 600 with 256 MB ram and two HDs(a 17 and a 60gb).

I noticed some low cost DVD-R drives at my local electronics store. The brands I noticed were Pine and Pacific Digital.

Basically what I need to know is if my PC is fast enough to burn DVDs?

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Should be fine. Just keep the DVD recorder on the opposite IDE channel to where your source data is.

 

[DaveGTP]

It's fast enough for DVD burning, but you would have to be real patient with video editing or compression. Your PC would be very very slow doing much with video manipulation.

The burning part would be the easy part.

 

[Justin Ward]

I've done alot of MPEG encoding for VCD/SVCDs so I'm aware it will take a long time. But the actual burning should go smoothly?

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Yes, it should be. Just avoid doing any CPU or IDE intensive tasks at the same time.

 

[Ed O'Neill]

Justin,
I noticed when shopping for dvd burners that manufacturers had diffrent processor speed specs. You might want to check that out.

hope this helps
Ed

 

[GrahamJW]

Justin:

You may want to look into multi-fromat DVD burners (the burners that will burn both standards: DVD-RW and DVD+RW). That way you will have more format options. This will be a concern if you want to play recorded DVDs on a player connected to a TV. Most only support one standard either DVD-R (DVD-RW), or DVD+R (DVD+RW). Pioneer, Sony and Plextor make multi-format DVD burners that are of good quality. They aslo burn CD-RWs.

What operating system are you using? If you got XP you may want to install another 256 MB of RAM to bring to 512 MB of RAM. It is a cheap upgrade and will decrease your vitural swap file on your hard drive...just a suggestion I thought I would pass on...

Cheers..John