I am trying to help a friend out with slow dvd burns on his pc. It will take him about 2 hours or so to burn a dvd. And often the burns end up in failure. He has used everything from crap media to verbatim. I am not sure on the model of dvd player her has to provide that info for you guys I would need to know of a program that could provide me with that info. Basically I really don't know whre to start.

What application is he using to burn these DVDs?

Slow burning is often down to DMA not being properly enabled. Look at this thread for help with this.

CD-DVD Speed is a useful app for identifying the burner & to get details about the media used.

i didn't check to see if dma was enabled because i didn't know how to under windows xp until i found a tutorial on how to do so after i posted last night. I will try that and will use cd-dvd speed to determine the drive and provide more details, if enabling dma doesn't work. He used easy cd creator 5 I believe to burn and dvd decryptor to back up and disable copywriter material.

As a starter read through this thread regarding DMA setting and how.

Simply use any program like Nero 6 or 7 (Nero Burning ROM) and burn all the photos in ISO format then if you want to you can use a program called My Album to place the burn photos there now use them as photo album or slide show.

Finally went over to my friends house and checked the dma settings. They were good. I tried changing ide cable same result slow burn. I updated the firmware. Got a slightly better burn. Used Nero cd speed. It showed a average speed of 9x but when I burn data I get about 4x... anyone know what could cause this? Both burns were on memorex media.. yes i know memorex sucks any suggestions? and sorry i didn't take a screen shot.

When you burn data unless you are burning enough data to fill the disc at that moment then you will not reach the max burn speed

I know this thread is 3 weeks old but I just wanted to say I put a new hard drive in the pc and a clean install of windows on the hd. The pc burns dvds great. I think the other hd in it had some malware/spyware and various trojans on it. And was just having space issues. thanx for all the help.. and storm jumper i don't agree with what you said you could put 100 meg or 4 gigs on a dvd it will burn at full speed. at least it does for me.

That is very much possibility, you could also reformat your old one and still get the same result as your new one.

I was going to suggest not having 40 or 50 programs running in the background on start up and clean your system up from spyware/viruses, clean the registry and do a defrag. Don't forget to pull the plug on your modem as you can use all the computer memory dedicated to burning without any BS updating info from every program you have trying to check every five minutes if it's the latest upgrade...

Takes me about an hour to clear my conscience for burning...

All burners start off at a slow burn rate as StormJumper suggests and will progressively increase their speed throughout the burn. So you're wrong I'm afraid.
Some applications like Nero will , by default , only show the selected speed as the actual burn speed. In Nero 6 you need to edit the registry to get it to show the actual burn speed , whereas in Nero 7 there's an option setting for it.

Buffer protection dictates the burn speed. If the buffer runs low the writing speed follows suit otherwise the buffer runs out and you end up with a coaster. Roxio 9 will display the variable speed during burn process.