Digital Home Thoughts: 8x DVD Duplication - Works Nicely!

I had a project where I was given two DVD-R discs and asked to make three copies of each DVD. I fired up Nero, got out my Ritek 8x DVDs, and got down to it. The process was fairly painless - I remember someone commenting in our forums that DVD burning at 8x sometimes resulted in flawed DVDs that wouldn't play in commercial set-top players, so I was leery of my first burn, but it finished flawlessly:



I then took that DVD and put it in my Samsung DVD player and it played perfectly (though I have to admit, I didn't watch all two hours of it). Out of the six DVDs I burned, one flaked out on me. I'm not sure why - Nero complained about the process failing but didn't give me a specific error message. I noticed one interesting thing though when I was burning the DVD: I had placed the source DVD in my LG DVD-ROM/CD-R burner, which reads DVDs at 16x speed. The drive is in an ADS Tech Firewire enclosure and connected to the main PC. So I found it curious that the drive wasn't able to pump data fast enough to the DVD burner:



I know that 8x drives can't burn at 8x all the way through the disc, but the bottleneck here seemed to be the 16x DVD-ROM drive. How very strange! Has anyone had a similar problem? At any rate, I found the process quite quick and it's quite a thrill to pound out a DVD at 11 MB per second. Yee haw! 8)