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seanyepez · Nov 7, 2002, 09:25 PM

Knowing JayTi to be a very busy man, I'm not surprised he didn't elaborate. Explaining something tends to be very long-winded and there's no use in saying it unless someone's going to hear it.

JayTi · Nov 7, 2002, 09:43 PM

Well, I guess the purpose of my post was to say that it can in fact burn DVD-RWs. If your burning in iDVD 2, what you do is stick a blank DVD-R in the drive, press record, it will encode, and before it finishes encoding, eject the DVD-R and stick in a DVD-RW and it will burn flawlessly. That help?

Eug · Nov 7, 2002, 10:12 PM

Originally posted by JayTi:
Well, I guess the purpose of my post was to say that it can in fact burn DVD-RWs. If your burning in iDVD 2, what you do is stick a blank DVD-R in the drive, press record, it will encode, and before it finishes encoding, eject the DVD-R and stick in a DVD-RW and it will burn flawlessly. That help?

Ah. The iMac/PowerMac SuperDrive trick works. Or I suppose if you're not using iDVD2 you could use Toast.

Anyways, it certainly sounds like it's a Pioneer.

iBorg · Nov 7, 2002, 10:19 PM

Originally posted by hook:
I can't really afford to wait any longer, so I went for the 1ghz with combo drive (my PowerTower Pro tends to cough and weeze all day). Hoping to have it by the end of next week. However, according to the Macnn main page, it looks like Apple is getting ready to update these Superdrive's via a download. Might improve speeds and make it even more worthwhile.

Actually, no. All the firmware update does is allow the SuperDrive to use higher speed DVD-R's - no improvement in performance.

Per AppleCare Document: 86130 "This firmware update enables the SuperDrive to read from and write to high-speed media, but it does not increase the drive's speed; the updated 2x SuperDrive writes to high-speed media at 1x, so you should continue using 2x DVD-R media for best performance."

In other words, using higher speed DVD-R media gives slower performance, but can be used, in 2x SuperDrives. The Ti's SuperDrive is 1x only.

iBorg

icruise · Nov 7, 2002, 10:41 PM

Whether or not the superdrive can only burn at 1X isn't really that big of a deal -- most reasonably priced media ($1 or so apiece as opposed to Apple's $5 apiece) is 1X only, and I've also heard from many people that burning at 1X makes the resulting discs more compatible with a variety of players, and can help avoid errors in general (not sure to what extent this is actually true, but...) In any case, burning a full DVD at 1X takes about 60 minutes. Unless you want to burn dozens one right after the other, it isn't really a problem.

Synotic · Nov 8, 2002, 02:10 AM

Originally posted by Eug:
Well, you only need 1X to play DVDs. Nothing wrong with the combo drive though. I betcha it will be a lot easier to find a region free firmware for that than for the new SuperDrive, for now.

This is probably a stupid question, but I am somewhat confused on this it whole 3X, 6X etc... numbers. What do they represent? I know when like ripping a CD it means you can read a 6 minute song in 1 minute with 6X reading... But what does this mean in terms of watching a DVD when you want to watch it at 1X?... Does it mean fast-forwarding/rewinding?... Thanks

RoofusPennymore · Nov 8, 2002, 08:49 AM

Originally posted by Synotic:
This is probably a stupid question, but I am somewhat confused on this it whole 3X, 6X etc... numbers. What do they represent? I know when like ripping a CD it means you can read a 6 minute song in 1 minute with 6X reading... But what does this mean in terms of watching a DVD when you want to watch it at 1X?... Does it mean fast-forwarding/rewinding?... Thanks

In the case of a CD, 1X is the speed that a regular audio CD plays. Which also happens to be 150 k/s i believe.

The same would be true for DVD. 1x is the speed that a regular video DVD plays. Not sure what the k/s is though.

jhunt5247 · Nov 8, 2002, 09:34 AM

Originally posted by RoofusPennymore:

In the case of a CD, 1X is the speed that a regular audio CD plays. Which also happens to be 150 k/s i believe.

The same would be true for DVD. 1x is the speed that a regular video DVD plays. Not sure what the k/s is though.

Ok, if this is true, then why even bother with anything except for 1X? What do they have 6X, 8X, 10X, etc..

beefstu01 · Nov 8, 2002, 10:33 AM

Well, at this point in time it makes no sense having dvd drives read faster than 1x other than to provide a buffer, but that can be done at 1x anyway.

The reason why there are greater speeds are that you can do things faster. Computers aren't limited as to how fast they can transfer data (well, they are, but you know what I mean), so they can read CDs at greater than 2x (which is what most CD players nowadays run), and we all know that data and programs can be stored on CDs, so why transfer that information slower when we can transfer it faster?

The same will be true for DVDs in the near future. Sometime within the next couple of years, programs or suites of programs will be released on DVD instead of 6 or 7 CDs. It'll be faster for the user to transfer data at 2X or 4X than at 1x.

That's why we bother with faster drives. (And no, your question wasn't stupid. I asked that many times before I got an answer. No such thing as a dumb question, unless my little brother asks it

)

buffalolee · Nov 8, 2002, 10:44 AM

Originally posted by RoofusPennymore:

In the case of a CD, 1X is the speed that a regular audio CD plays. Which also happens to be 150 k/s i believe.

The same would be true for DVD. 1x is the speed that a regular video DVD plays. Not sure what the k/s is though.

Try kilobytes/second. That would be the transfer rate.

10X CD-ROM = 1,500 KB/Sec

Eug · Nov 8, 2002, 10:44 AM

Originally posted by jhunt5247:

Ok, if this is true, then why even bother with anything except for 1X? What do they have 6X, 8X, 10X, etc..

Because it's for data support.

1X is around 11 Mbps. That would take about 60 minutes to read a 4.37 GB disc of data. A true 12X DVD would take 5 minutes.

A bonus is the fact that newer DVD-ROM drives have faster access times too.

Plus if you're going to backup data direct disc to disc, it's usually best to have the read speed twice as fast as the write speed. So if you want 4X write it's ideal to have 6-10X read speed on the source disc.

By the way, ripping a DVD is a completely different kettle of fish.

1) Most DVD rip speeds are often MUCH slower than the max DVD read speed. Furthermore, the Pioneer SuperDrives are well-known to be very slow rippers. (2X?)

2) Ripping a DVD is a moot point most of the time anyway, since most big Hollywood DVDs are over 5 GB (dual layer). ie. You can't make a direct backup onto DVD-R.

DigitalDNA · Nov 8, 2002, 02:28 PM

Originally posted by skyman:

There are a vast majority of people that would be offended by your usage of the word "retard" when insulting someone. You should choose your words more carefully in the future.

LOL oh puhlease! There has been much more offensive stuff in this forum than that. If that offended anyone they can just get over it

RoofusPennymore · Nov 8, 2002, 06:50 PM

Originally posted by buffalolee:

Try kilobytes/second. That would be the transfer rate.

10X CD-ROM = 1,500 KB/Sec

Be happy I spelled it right!

I new someone would correct me anyway if I was wrong.

seanyepez · Nov 8, 2002, 07:06 PM

Originally posted by Synotic:
This is probably a stupid question, but I am somewhat confused on this it whole 3X, 6X etc... numbers. What do they represent? I know when like ripping a CD it means you can read a 6 minute song in 1 minute with 6X reading... But what does this mean in terms of watching a DVD when you want to watch it at 1X?... Does it mean fast-forwarding/rewinding?... Thanks

Actually, most of the time, ripping a CD is bottlenecked by the computer's processor. Though the iMac technically reads disks at 10-24 times the normal speed, it doesn't frequently go over 9 times speed ripping because it's not capable of encoding data fast enough.

Eug · Nov 9, 2002, 12:21 AM

Originally posted by seanyepez:

Actually, most of the time, ripping a CD is bottlenecked by the computer's processor. Though the iMac technically reads disks at 10-24 times the normal speed, it doesn't frequently go over 9 times speed ripping because it's not capable of encoding data fast enough.

To rip a CD you don't have to encode the data, unless you're making MP3z or something.

slugslugslug · Nov 9, 2002, 02:13 AM

Originally posted by JayTi:
Well, I guess the purpose of my post was to say that it can in fact burn DVD-RWs. If your burning in iDVD 2, what you do is stick a blank DVD-R in the drive, press record, it will encode, and before it finishes encoding, eject the DVD-R and stick in a DVD-RW and it will burn flawlessly. That help?

okay, so now we know the SuperDrive will burn to DVD-RW in iDVD, and according to this thread, it'll burn to them using Toast (although I think this is an assumption based on the behavior of the Power Mac SuperDrive). The question remains, what about the Finder? If I get one of these it could be a year of tinker w/iMovie etc. before I ever want to burn a video DVD. But one of the most useful (to me) features of the SuperDrive would be to quickly back up a whole bunch of data every couple months. And it seems as though I shouldn't have to spend the extra money on Toast or .Mac Backup to do this..

So: Jay? Sean? Burning DVD-RW from the Finder? what gives?

thanks.
y. (someday I may get a sig)