Sunday, March 12, 2006

DVD burning resolved

Lately I've been suffering from a couple of ultimately unrelated problems when trying to burn DVDs (in Linux). I'm repeating what I found elsewhere in hopes it's easier to find for the next guy.

First off, burning was horribly slow, and the CPU usage was abnormally high while burning. Turns out KDE has copied Microsoft's dubious auto-insert notification. The solution: turn it off. BTW, KDE, it's ridiculous that the dialog box that pops up does not offer an option to turn off the daemon forever. As others point out, K3B should also detect the problem and warn about it. I wonder if I should give Gnome a shot.

The other problem was that double-layer DVDs wouldn't burn in some modes. The solution here was to upgrade the DVD burner firmware. In particular, I upgraded my Sony DRU-800A from KY04 to KY06. I found the firmware version in /proc/ide/ide1/hdd/identify. The firmware upgrade utility only runs in Windows, but after all the box does say "for Windows" on it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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TilRMan said...

Awesome, my first blog spam.