Method for determining optimum burn speed?

[NOTS3W]

Lightning UK! did a great job on his 'Auto Write Speed' guide for ImgBurn. But now I have questions on how to go about determining the best speed for a drive-media combination. Is this just trial and error? Do most of you conduct a series of tests on each burner you own for each new media code you buy or do you assume the highest speed until you start seeing problems and gradually step down in speed to find one that works better? Is the decision based on scan results (i.e. Nero CD-DVD Speed) or real-world playability of the burned disc?

 

Thanks.

 

Ray

[LOCOENG]

I tend to burn at max speed with new drives/media just to see how well the combo is handled and crosscheck with CD Speed or DVDInfoPro. I usually come back down to earth at some point and stick around 12X-16X though. To each their own, you'll just have to find your own comfort zone and only you can be the judge of the quality of your burns.

[Cynthia]

The Discovery mode is nice to use for this purpose. Burn three discs at 8x/12x/16x (or one for a faster speed if you have a writer that supports 18-22x), then use either Nero DiscSpeed or DVDInfoPro to see how good those burns actually were.

 

The tricky thing with the scanning is that you need to get a reader/writer that can do those scans, not all readers/writers are suited for that. Older Benq's and later Lite-On's seems to be nice for this purpose.