I’m trying to decide if I’ve got a problem. Copying a DVD to the hard drive (not encrypted) takes a good forty minutes. I’m showing 1.32 MB/second.
It’s a Plextor EIDE dvd drive that I bought in 2008. Hasn’t been used very much.
Am I expecting too much? is forty minutes typical to copy a dvd with 4 gig to the hard drive? Would I get a faster copy with a SATA drive?
I’d like to archive my dvd’s with handbrake to x264. But it’s pretty daunting just getting the silly thing copied over. I’m concerned the dvd drive will wear out long before I get my legally purchased dvd’s archived.
I’ve reached the point where I just don’t watch dvd’s much any more. It’s such a pain in the butt to drag the case off the shelf, insert the disk, mess around with that stupid menu and play the movie. A folder of x264 mp4’s is such a simple click away.
I tried Handbrake once with a dvd in the drive. Very bad idea. It was just beating up that drive with non stop reads and the encode was dragging on and on. Finally aborted it.
I’ve never read or written a DVD, but I do a lot of CDs.
4 GB is a single-sided single-layer DVD. It should take you about 57 minutes to write this at 1x. (1385 kB/s). Reading shouldn’t be any longer, and I can’t imagine you don’t have a capability to read at at least 8 to 10x and very possibly 20x.
It finally finished. Took closer to 50 minutes. I shudder to think about the beating that poor drive took. But, dvd drives are $35 on newegg. So I guess wearing one out isn’t that big of a deal.
It’s a good reminder of how slow and primitive dvd technology really is. Especially in todays world with solid state hard drives.
I guess the slow read speed doesn’t matter as much if you’re just playing the dvd. It’s got plenty of time to retrieve the data for the dvd player and maintain a good data rate at 30fps.
40 minutes? That seems rather long. I think, IF I were to rip a DVD to HDD, said DVD being double sided, i.e. ~8 GB, it would take at the most 30 minutes. Are you compressing it at the same time? It might be faster to copy, then compress.
I’d actually guess that it would not be any slower using handbrake or any other encoding method, as the DVD read speed is the bottleneck. Most computers would have plenty of time to encode what’s already been read while it’s waiting on the DVD drive.
Obviously, YMMV depending on the drive and the connection method; my SATA-2 internal drive will do it a tad faster. Ultimately, the limiting factor is how fast you can spin and read the disc itself, not the actual transfer rate, since EIDE and SATA are both intended for HDD access and are bound to be much faster than what a DVD drive can feed it.
It takes me about 6 minutes on a 4 yo PC with an IDE DVD drive connected to the buss. External USB might be slower. (We’re talking 4.7GB, single side, single layer)
It takes about 8 minutes on my 7 yo PC, so I’d say 40 minutes is way out of line unless you’re running DOS 4.
Are you sure you are simply copying it, not re-encoding it? That might take a lot longer.
I’m trying an encode directly from the dvd. Some of the comments here got me curious to see if it worked better than I remembered from two years ago.
So far it’s doing pretty good. Getting about 19.6 fps encoding rate. Sometimes it drops down to 17fps. DVD drive is running fast, but smooth. No stop/start jerky reads like I remembered from 2 years ago.
*Encode? * Just what are you trying to accomplish? Encoding is not copying; it’s processing. Are you trying to rip the DVD tracks into playable files of a different type? That’s going to take more time and computing power than just copying the entire disk to a folder on your hard drive. I can see 20-40 minutes for that, and that’s mostly CPU power.
Just to prove I’m right, I just copied a 2.7GB DVD onto a hard drive. 4 minutes. NOT encoding, decoding or transcoding, but copying.
I was copying from the DVD to the hard drive last night when this thread was started. Then used Handbrake to encode it from the hard drive to an x264 mp4.
Now, I’m trying Handbrake directly against a DVD in the drive. Saving the step of copying. Since the copy takes so long, I thought it was worth trying to skip that step.
I’m puzzled too why that copy took so long. I ordered a new SATA dvd drive to try. It should be in next week. I’m hoping it will gain me some speed.
Am I being whooshed? You guys are just messing with the OP, right? Ripping (or copying) a single-layer DVD takes about five minutes. I did one just now.
Even a bottom-barrel DVD drive from 2008 should be way faster than 40 minutes. I don’t know what you’re copying and I wouldn’t mention that here, but if your ripping program is having trouble with the copy protection, sometimes it can rip it but very slowly. Either that or it’s scratched/smudged. Wipe it down first, from the hole in straight lines outward. Does it work faster with all DVDs?
I might be misremembering. I used to copy DVDs, then compress them to play on a Sony PSP. Now that I think about it, it probably took 15-20 minutes to copy the DVD, then about 45 minutes to convert the file on the hard drive into a MPEG. And I was using a laptop with a Pentium IV processor from 2002. Not as fast as newer PCs, but it did the job.
I may have screwed up by using a EIDE dvd drive. It’s the only IDE device in the computer that I built in 2010. All the hard drives are SATA. I thought it would speed things up by having the dvd on the IDE channel. Since nothing else is using it. But, perhaps not.
Anyhow, I got a SATA dvd drive getting delivered sometime next week.
here’s some stats comparing the DVD encode from the hard drive vs direct from the dvd. Using Handbrake’s High Profile setting. I pulled this from the log file.
It’s significantly quicker encoding directly from the dvd drive. I saved about 30 minutes by not copying first.
work: average encoding speed for job is 22.728676 fps
took just under 2 hours (plus the time I spent copying the Video_TS folder to the hard drive)
work: average encoding speed for job is 19.373100 fps
took 2 hours 15 min reading directly from the dvd drive
I just ripped a test DVD, it took 11m28s. When someone says “rip,” I assume it’s DVD –> .ISO or other image format, that you can then play in VLC or similar, but it wouldn’t play in many DVD/media players (say off a USB stick). Encoding it to MPEG, AVI, etc. could indeed take longer, but I don’t do it often enough to remember how long, but 40-60 minutes total doesn’t sound inaccurate.
Sure hope I get those kinds of results after changing out my dvd drive. It would be nice.
I have a Intel core 2 duo E8500 3.16GHz processor. Kind of surprised my best encoding is only 22.7fps. That’s with the High Profile setting. I noticed in the handbrake log that its using my CPU’s SSE3,SSE4 features to encode my x264 video. Those hardware features help a lot. But, I’m already a couple years behind in technology. It’s nearly impossible to stay current.
If you’re using Handbrake, you’re not copying, you’re transcoding. Handbrake is a ripping program. Ripping is not pure copying. It’s going to take more time because the CPU has to work harder.
What happens if you use the built-in Windows functions for copying?
And just in case there’s something else going on here, copying from a DVD will be 10 times slower if you are somehow trying to copy more than one file simultaneously. DVD/CD technology is not random access, like a hard drive, but sequential. Forcing it into a random mode will slow it down drastically.
Example: If, for any reason, I need to edit video files from a DVD, I copy (not transcode) the files to a temporary directory on my fastest hard drive, then work from there, even though that’s an extra step. Video editing programs tend to do a lot of file access in the background in random mode, and this is the only way to work fast.
So if your goal is to convert DVD-style files into MP4, MPG or something like it, you could try simple copying to a hard drive, then running the ripping program from there. It’s worth a try.