How slow is the iMac's DVD burner?

[capo64]

I know it's 8x, which is why I think I definitely did something wrong.

I used Roxio Toast to burn 6 episodes of the office on a single layer DVD (about 2 hours and 15 minutes). It took over three hours to do this. I'm not a DVD expert, but on my old PC with a 16x drive it wouldn't take more than 20 minutes.

Did I do something wrong? Is the DVD burner really this slow? Another reason I think I did something wrong was because I could not tell that the DVD was burning. It was completely SILENT, but my CPU usage was at 85%+ for all three hours. Toast's settings said burn at maximum possible speed.

I'm using the 3.06 new iMac.

 

[youssefm]

my macbook also takes forever to burn things so it could just be macs are slow at burning lol.. idk

 

[r.j.s]

Toast had to encode the video first, that probably took about 2 1/2 of the three hours.

 

[nick9191]

As what r.j.s said, the video needs encoding to be burnt. If you burn a normal data DVD it shouldn't take much more than your old PC. The DVD drive is slower because the iMac uses a laptop drive due to it's thin form factor. Your CPU was at 85c because it was encoding the video (very high CPU usage).

And ignore archipellago, most of us here are nice.