Slow CD/DVD Rip Speed Help

[Dyaus]

I just got a new external DVD Burner for Christmas (Plextor 755uf) and decided to test out its read speed by ripping a DVD and a CD. Unfortunately the test did not go as well as I was expecting. The time to rip a 7.5GB DVD was about 50 minutes! I was using Mac the Ripper in my test. I then decided to use my internal DVD drive and it was just as slow.

When I look at Activity Monitor while ripping a DVD the highest speed for Data written/sec is ~2.5MB/sec. This is exactly the same for both my internal and external drive. Does anyone know if something is limiting my ripping speed? I see the same cap when I try to rip a CD as well. My computer is a powerbook with the G4 processor. I'm running OSX 10.4.8.

Any help would be appreciated. I had really hoped getting an external device would increase the speed I could rip media, but it isn't any faster.

 

[mad jew]

Conversion? Are you ripping to a specific format or something? When I rip DVDs, I convert them to AVIs. The data transfer isn't the bottleneck so much as the conversion process.

 

[Dyaus]

Mad Jew, thanks for the suggestion, but I am just ripping the DVD to a raw format so no conversion is taking place.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, how does it compare with simply ripping data from a DVD via Finder?

 

[jsw]

What interface are you using to connect the drive? If it's USB, are you certain you're not going somehow using USB 1.1 (via an old hub, for example)?

 

[clevin]

since u tried both external and internal dvd drive, only thing i can think of is your harddisk might be slow.

 

[Dyaus]

What interface are you using to connect the drive? If it's USB, are you certain you're not going somehow using USB 1.1 (via an old hub, for example)?

I've tried it with both USB and Firewire and both have the same problem.

Clevin, I don't think it's the hard drive because I can transfer files to my computer from the network at 10MB+/sec.

Thanks for the suggestiongs. Keep them coming.

 

[Dyaus]

I was finally able to rip DVD video at faster than 2x speed. Plextor limits the rip speed of the DVD for some reason, but there is a way around it. If you hold the eject button for 3 seconds when no DVD is inserted it removed the rip speed limitation.

Thanks to all who helped.