[Drakkon]

I recently came into posession of a IPOD video and am having all sorts of fun putting various DVD's on the thing. So far it says i have something like 10 days worth of video. However it is a SLOW process and the biggest bottleneck seems to be my DVD reader. it takes longer than the encoding process to read the DVD to HD (have one of those fancy 16MB buffer SATA models and a comp with a 3200+ and 3GB of ram so i think pretty clear the reader is my bottleneck)
So that being said any reviews lately about fastest reader availible?

I looked on CDFreaks and appears to be the BenQ 1640A....any other models out ther worth lookin into?

[hans5849]

for some reason DVD speeds havent gone like CD-RW speeds going massivley fast over a shor time.

[mistawiskas]

My proccesses are slow as heck too. WTF? We can put a robot on mars to send vids a gazillion miles faster than the shit I got.

[Wedge_]

Originally Posted by hans5849

for some reason DVD speeds havent gone like CD-RW speeds going massivley fast over a shor time.

The reason is that DVD 1x speed isn't the equivalent of CD 1x speed. Have a look here: http://www.osta.org/technology/dvdqa/dvdqa4.htm.

I have a couple of NEC DVD-RW drives (3540A and 3550A) that both seem to be pretty fast at ripping. Using DVD Decrypter they tend to top out around 10x. You might want to check for firmware upgrades for your current reader - one of my drives came with a deliberately crippled firmware version that limited read speeds to 2x or something when it thought you were ripping a protected DVD. I found a 3rd party firmware version somewhere that removed the restriction though.

[Jamsan]

I've had painful experiences when ripping DVD's until I bought my BenQ burner... It's a BenQ DW1640. I got it from Newegg almost a year ago, and has been super speedy.. I can typically rip and encode a movie with DVD Shrink in less than 10 minutes. Overall rip/encode/burn is less than 20 minutes a movie.

The drive isn't available at newegg anymore, but you may be able to find it somewhere else. As a side, if you do get the drive, about 5-6 months ago, the drive was running great, but out of nowhere, slowed down alot. It started taking 40+ minutes to rip/encode, and it was chewing up my cpu cycles, making my PC unbearably slow. I poked around, and found out there was an updated firmware out for it, installed it, and it was back to the way it was before the problem. Speedy and not chewing up cpu time.

[Devzero]

Sexy Plexy - end of story. ^_^

[hans5849]

this thread led to me finding out there was a cross flash for my burner that was 8x read instead of 4x