Can I be burning a movie while at the same time burn a different movie or is it suggested for best quality to simply do one or the other - not both at the same time?
I try not to download and burn at the same time but those time's I do (quite often actually), I've never noticed any ill effect's. Beside's, I have an animated desktop running using 15-20% CPU usage and I use Vuze which pack's a fair wallop. If using obscene amount's (shouldn't be with any program I know of), you could alway's lower priority in Task Manager, I guess, and leave your burning program at normal. Burn's only take 15-20 minutes; try it and see but don't delete the original until you're sure everything is fine. Or are you asking about burning two video's at once; never tried that and probably wouldn't?
I have done minimal tasks while burning, such as web browsing, however, I/O intensive tasks can potentially starve the I/O pipe to the DVD writing task, emptying your disk buffers, and if prolonged, the device buffers. At that point you will possibly see errors in the burn, and at worst case, an aborted burn.
I definitely wouldn't try to torrent or do any heavy downloading while I burn unless the download target was different than the source for the DVD write and they are all on separate cables. This is impossible to do with IDE unless you have more than 2 controllers.
I carry on as normal when I'm burning something... but then again I have a proper OS which multitasks properly and I don't waste 20-30% cpu cycles on garbage like animated desktop pointlessness.. XD
Come on varnull, it's not like I need the CPU for anything else. The desktop isn't necessary but certainly not pointless, just something to amuse me when I'm on Vista and trying to figure out why my optical's don't work properly. I like the way it look's when I'm not using XP. Kudo's to you for using Linux and I think Linux is great too but I can get everything done I want except these damn drive's and I'm sure that's due to Vista, their fine on XP. The point is there is a fair amount of CPU usage here and burn's are fine so far.
If the CPU is dual core or more, and the SATA drive with downloads is not the same drive a the SATA with the data to be burned (hopefully on another SATA burner), then it should be fine. One older systems, especially with IDE or USB2 drives, you're asking for problems, the older the tech goes.
