On 9/28/2010 11:45 PM, homey wrote:
On 9/28/2010 5:46 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:59:11 -0400, the renowned "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


Nico Coesel wrote:

Jim
wrote:

In keeping with my policy of staying way behind the bleeding edge of
technology, the only DVD burner I have is a stand-alone Sony unit
that
I feed video from my camcorder or DVD player.

What do you fellow lurkers recommend for an external DVD burner
that's
easy to move from PC to PC?

Avoid anything with a parallel port. USB is the way to go these days.


I've never seen a parallel port DVD burner.

CD writer, yes. Eg. HP 7200e, but that's probably more than a decade
old.


I have a couple parallel port CDROM drives, but the idea of using a
parallel port for a DVD? It would be a very slow& painful process.


And why would that be? In this case, a parallel port moves 8 bits at a
time compared with 1 for USB. The drive can cache as much as it wants
and in a flat out race, USB would always loose.


But the transfer rate of the parallel port is ultimately limited by its
clock rate, which for backwards-compatibility reasons is going to be
limited to the clock rate of the original ISA bus, which was 8Mhz. ECP
transfer mode could do something like 1.5 MB/s, which even USB 1.0 full
speed easily beats.