Received my 3500 ext yesterday.
Ripping with DVD Decrypter on a 4 hour Soprano disk takes about 45mins.
Compressing with DVD2one takes about 55min for same file.
Then it burns in about 15 mins on Ritek G05 -r disc's.
Averaging almost 2 hours a disc??? Is this normal? I'm ripping with the combo drive in my DELL Inspiron 5100 notebook. Watching the speeds while ripping, it will start about 1.8x, then maybe jump up to 2.8x, then 3.8x, then back down again ( depending on the file I guess ).

I did a test run with DVD xcopy 3.02 on a 2 hour movie. Ripped and recorded in 35-40 mins. I would just keep using that, but the Sopranos disc got compressed to only filling the blank about 50%???! I knew that wasnt right, 4 hours into the space of 1 hour? Atleast with the DVD2one I'm going to get the best utilization of disc space, but these times are killing me. I havent tried a regular 2 hour movie yet to see if its any faster ( with Decryp/2one ), maybe I should do that right now.

I suggest you to use DVD Shrink for compressing the movies, where you can define what you will keep and which not, meaning subtitles, extras etc.

Here is a simple guide for it.

The combo drive is it installed on a laptop?

Which firmware do you have in the NEC?

(in reply to jimr)

OK, I'll try DVD Shrink. I only used DVD2one because thats what the article on how to do this said ( here on this site ).

Yes, the combo is in my Laptop.
I have no idea which firmware I have.

I did burn a 2 hour movie yesterday. Took 50mins all together. Not as fast as DVD xcopy, but not bad either.

(in reply to Iggy)

Update NEC's firmware, this will help you.

It seems that the laptop's HD is a kind of slow. Probably this is the reason of increased ripping time.

(in reply to jimr)