Hacking Is there a difference in burning at x speeds?

[Chocolina]

I mean performance-wise, burning at 2.4x, 4x, or 8x.

Sofar I've burned all my games at 4x, and they all run fine in-game engine, but during videos, like Wario Land or Mario Galaxy's intros, the video and sounds are laggy.

So does write speed make a difference?

 

[FAST6191]

Many things probably want to be said

Back in the pre DVD burning days you had things like buffer underruns to worry about, modern drives and burning programs should be able to negate that.

If you do experience an underrun (I usually find too much stuff accessing a given hard drive coupled with a nice big of fragmentation does this) or something akin to it sometimes the noise on the disc increases- you can measure it or you can sometimes see it on the burned surface. This would be the main benefit to burning at a slower speed these days but if you make sure you do not have a hugely fragmented ISO and do not run a virus scan or otherwise use the hard drive during burning you should be good.

For the wii the softmod methods of disc reading can only read at 3x DVD speed vs the normal 6x speed (the 3x was a function left on earlier DVD models to eventually allow DVDs to be read but data is data). Proper drive chips you solder on and things like the WODE read at 6x though. 3x speed coupled with a lot of aggressive read techniques mean games tend not to worry for the main game but videos and sounds are the exception here.

 

[Dork]

Usually, the slower the burning speed, the more accurate the medium is. I may be wrong though.

 

[the_randomizer]

Higher burn speeds often result in errors (such as 52x speed). There's a good reason drives don't go beyond that, if they were to go any faster, the disc and drive may get damaged.

 

[Rydian]

A slower burn means less chance of a buffer underrun. Also don't use the computer for other shit when burning.

It's not like you need to burn at 1x for everything anymore, but slower in general is safer because errors on CD-R or DVD-R media cannot be corrected, if bad data is written, the disc is fucked.

 

[Cyan]

I once found a comparison graph showing that disc burnt at their "recommended speed" produced better result that slower burnt.
I tried to find that again, but didn't search a lot

I found this instead:
http://www.cdrinfo.com/sections/reviews/Print.aspx?ArticleId=20949
There are two burners and two disc manufacturers (Verbatim and Taiyo, -R and +R).

at the end, there's a conclusion showing that it greatly depend on the burner itself (one made good result in all speed, the other one only at the recommended speed of the disc)
Burning slower is not always the best.

The first and most striking thing is that all discs burnt by the Lite-On drive and read with the LG, were good. There wasn't a single disc that produced the slightest hint of a speed drop. In this case, it is impossible to come to some conclusion as to whether burning speed affects the writing quality.

In contrast, discs burned with the LG drive and read with the Lite-On resulted in a mixed bag with regard to quality. Unlike our conclusions from the DaTARIUS scans, 8X is not the best speed, that honour goes to 16X. In fact, the only conclusion we can come to here is that 20X is not a good choice.

Edit:
Like Fast said, if you are using a softmod to read burnt disc, the Wii is set to 3x instead of 6x and that's why some games have laggy videos.
If you have a modchip with 6x speed and still have lags, then it could be the disc.
USB loading is a good alternative to that problem.

 

[TheRedfox]

Btw, why would you still use burned dvd's while you can just use a external hdd?

 

[M[u]ddy]

I once had a test of different drives that showed that 4x and 8x usually produce the best results, but I can't find it anymore. Burning to slow decreases the quality and is a waste of time.
For consoles a good readability is important. Pressed discs are easier to read and console drives are only made to read pressed discs. If the burned disc is hard to read the drive might die.
The reason for this is the lens. It's floating in a liquid and can be adjusted with electromagnets. When the disc is hard to read the lens has to be readjusted a lot and it will start to wear off.

The reason for the lag is as FAST6191 said the different reading speed. Pressed retail discs are in Wii-format and will be read at 6x speed. Burned discs are always in DVD-R format and will only be read at 3x speed.