How many mhz to reasonably burn dvd?

[Soap]

i have a friend who recently had their cd burner apparently die on them (it sounded sick) and they want to me to help them buy a new one.

somebody told me the other day something about the speed of a somputer and burning dvd's. just curious is there a minimum speed and if at all one what would it be to use a dvd burner?

and also how fast would a computer have to be to watch a dvd on the computer smoothly?

i do not have a dvd drive or burner in my computers as i have not had the need for one yet so i know very very little about them.

the only only thing i know about her computer is thats its a hewlett packard and i would assume it has 128mb ram max. not sure on the speed around the 500 possibly 450mhz pentium 3.

 

[Godataloss]

I have a p2-400mhz that has one of the first dvd roms- had to install a mpeg hardware decoder (real magic hollywood- very nice) for artifact-free rendering.

Now I wouldn't think dvd authoring would be any greater demand on a system than rendering and it appears most burners support 98SE.

 

[LNCPapa]

I have 5 DVD burners and I believe the minimum spec for the drives to burn a DVD on the x86 side is a P!!! 800

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Hdd speed affects more than CPU speed. I've burnt DVDs without problems with a 333 MHz Pentium II. Just make sure hdd and DVD-burner use DMA.

 

[MYOB]

HDD speed, speed of the IDE controller, where on the IDE chain the drive is placed, and most importantly, what other processes are doing are all vital to the CD or DVD burning process.

I know its not a DVD, but I've used Windows 95C on a 486 with an IDE CD burner without any problems. However, you had to be careful to murder any other processes on the system before starting - anything that accesses the HDD or the IDE chain while burning could destroy the burn.

 

[Soap]

thank you all for your help with your comments/experiences.

 

[Rick]

The "recommended" lowest system spec for DVD burning is 500Mhz.

It isn't the CPU speed that is really important, but the overall system. I think manufacturers figure if you have an old Pentium III or high end Pentium II system, you probably have about 64mb to 128mb of memory (not very good) with a small hard disk (Probably 10-13Gb) which really isn't very much.

You don't have to render anything to burn a regular DVD, but copying other DVDs that require being decoded / compressed may take a very long time.

And if even if your system can't keep up with the burner, virtually any burner you can purchase supports some sort of buffer underrun protection which solves that problem.

My opinion - It will work fine. It might take longer to rip movies, but the actual burning process will work great.