Any thoughts on narrowing this down for me of what the likely cause was for my first disc that skips during playback at times? Being use dvdshrink to back up my TV show dvd box sets. Well over hundred disc successes without ever seeing this problem, I rather NEVER see it again. Same media, pc everything. Only thing new is two things. I had downloads going in background that week and thought they didnt interfere with dvdshrink while it encodes and analysing as well as dvd decryptor reading and burning. Second I started to use analyse, doing 3 eps disc instead of just 2 since quality seems same and I use more dvd space up. Either downloads or fact that using analysing makes skipping occurances seems only possible reasons. Any thought appreciated.

neither of those would cause skipping to occur. maybe it's just a single bad burn.

It's not a good idea to multi-task during the burn process. Encoding is fine.

multitasking during the burn shouldn't be a problem as long as the recording drive has buffer underrun protection.

In practice, buffer underrun is NOT perfect. DVD play back issues can occur when one muli-task...usually related to poor burn quality.

poor burn quality and buffer underruns aren't exactly related to one another. an emptied buffer will simply cause recording to stop until the buffer is refilled. in any case, the multitasking madara32 is describing is downloading, which wouldn't cause a buffer underrun.

If the burn drive must slow down, then the quality of the burn will most likely decrease. Burn a DVD, then try to run a HD/CPU intensive task during the burn. Check the burn quality. Very easy test for those with disc quality checking ability.

Downloading isn't HD/CPU intensive, but it's always best to learn the RIGHT way of burning DVDs.

whether or not recording at a slower speed would result in a lower quality burn would depend on the media and the write strategy being used. for example, if the drive was optimized to burn on a particular type of media at 4x, and recording was originally done at 8x but slowed to 4x because of buffer underruns, then the resulting quality would actually be higher than if the burn finished at 8x.

Getting few more now, maybe drive is having issues? It seems you guys nailed on head with buffer running out. No multasking just burning and Im getting Write Rate from modest 4x down to 1x for nearly minute as buffer runs out. Then I/O error. Not sure what causes this. I guess try burn at 2x, but that is kind of lame for drive and media that can do over triple.

Yup...buffer underrun is not a miracle worker.

Boot into BIOS and verify that all hard drives and optical drives are seen and set to use AUTO detection. Save and exit. Reboot and go to Device Manager and remove the Primary and Secondary IDE channels. Reboot and verify that devices 0 and 1 in Primary and Secondary IDE channels are set to use DMA mode. Save and Reboot. Verify that all devices connected to Primary and Secondary IDE channels are running in DMA mode. Make sure the jumpers on the hardware are set to Cable Select OR Master/Slave if there are two devices connected to the IDE channel.