Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Workaround: brasero - slow speeds while burning

Brasero is a cd/dvd writing application for the Gnome desktop manager. Its advantages are ease of use, a lot of burning options and support for plugins!

Currently in Ubuntu 9.04, if you try to burn a disc, you might notice that:

  • Everything goes well until about 50%.
  • Afterwards, it continues, but the report does not show anything (empty progress bar).
  • The speed is less than 2x, from 600 KiB/s to 800KiB/s, but the burning keeps going.
  • Somewhere in the end, brasero shows progress again, but starts from 0%!!
  • Burn was successful.
Note: You should consider that this might not always be your issue with slow speeds. For example, maybe your drive is not working well, or maybe your power supply unit (PSU) does not have enough "W" to supply all your hardware with adequate power.

The bug information is extensively reported here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=582261

One of the developers detected and corrected the problem, which seems that it was using the wrong plugin ("wodim" instead of "growisofs"). Since Ubuntu's binary package brasero has wodim as a dependency, it might cause problems if you try to remove wodim.

There is a workaround though that seems to do the trick:

Don't forget to install the package for growisofs: dvd+rw-tools

1. Tell brasero to use growisof:
  - Press Alt+F2, and execute this command:
gconf-editor 

  - Head to apps ⟶ brasero ⟶ config ⟶ priority.
  - Change the number "0" next to wodim-burn to "-1" in order to disable it.
  - Change the number "0" next to growisofs-burn to "1" in order to set a higher priority.



2. Instead of using "Max" in speed burning options, set it manually at a high speed - e.g. choose 16x for a DVD or 52x for a CD.

That's it!


Credits go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/brasero/+bug/370999/comments/15
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/brasero/+bug/370999/comments/16

4 comments:

sucotronic said...

Thanks a lot for your post. Now I can burn my DVDs at a decent speed :D

Mark Serrano said...

I tried this suggestion. IT WORKS!!!

I set my speed to 8x but it will not set. Instead, the max it will go is 6x. Setting to 8x triggers Max speed. I haven't tried Max speed yet. But definitely after setting to 6x, I'm getting burn speeds of 6x instead of the slow 0.5x to 1x.

Thanks for compiling this tip. I'll spread the news to others.

Mark Serrano said...

Okay, I tried setting the speed of to MAX. Previously I tried 6x and the max speed I got is 6x. After setting to MAX, I'm able to get a maximum 8.4 speed. It actually average to 8.0x because sometimes it drops to 4.0, then 7.8x, then to 8.0 then to 8.4x.

Still the burning question here is how come in Windows, I'm able to get at least 12x to 16x speed? Or am I just imagining things?

Anonymous said...

i have to do this every 6 months (after every ubuntu upgrade). surprised there isn't more discussion/input into this bug. anyway, thanks!