DVD Capabilities

DVD READING / RIPPING

The Panasonic LF-D311 rips movies very close to its specified speed, at 5.8 DVD CAV MAX (8MB/sec) which you can see below -- although it fell slightly short of its declared 6x was still very good. The ripping speed is often not revealed by the manufacturers of DVD-ROM drives, our Toshiba SD-M1502 is a x16 DVD reader but can only read CSS disks at x2 speed. We have shown the speed of Pioneer A03 and Toshiba SD-M1502 for comparison below.

Toshiba SD-M1502 ripping a DVD-ROM movie

Pioneer DVR-A03 ripping at 2.1 speed

Panasonic LF-D311 ripping a CSS encrypted movie at 5.8x speed

Next we checked how it performed using a dual layered DVD-ROM movie disk:

This drive has a very fast recognition and dual layer change time. You can see the spike in the graph as it switches layers (17ms). Note: Nerospeed has problems when it comes to detecting the seek time and CPU usage.

The above is a graph of a DVD-RW disk which was burned with the Pioneer A03, as you can see the LF-D311 has no problems reading the disk and manages an average of 4.21 x speed using CAV.

DVD-R Blanks

Like the Pioneer A03 the LF-D311 can store up to 4.38GB of actual data onto a 4.7GB disk. Why can you only store 4.38GB of data?

The following is taken from PrimoDVD FAQ may answer any questions as to why you can't burn 4.7GB on to DVD-R blanks:

How big are DVD blanks? This depends on your unit of measure. While the specifications for the media describe the disc as being 3.9GB for DVD-R (or 4.7 for the new RW), DVD Rep considers the disc to be 3.6Gb (or 4.3Gb for the new RW). This is because we calculate the free space in Gb (1 gigabyte = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824), which is the method used by Windows to calculate free space. The specifications speak in terms of GB (1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000,000 ).

Page 5 - Last Updated: 11 November 2001