What is the difference between 1x 2x 3x and so on dvd roms?

I aquired an older toshiba laptop that works fantastic. It only had a cd rom so I bought a dvd rom on ebay to find this unit jittered more than my grandma when she was a teenager.

For what little I know this dvd rom I bought is a 6x. with a little home work I see lower X dvd roms running with the same cpu I have which is a pentium 2. My goal was to play the ocassional dvd when out and about and some music cd.s

SO help educate me on the different numbered X's of dvd roms. Especially keeping in mind I am running a lowely pentium 2

Answers:
That's the speed that the disk records.
1x is the speed that the DVD player can read. So 6x means that it can write 6 times faster than it can read.

Now this might sound odd, but the idea of the x came out for video Discs, so what I ment was that if you had a video playing from a DVD that was 60 minutes long, then you burned a copy of the video with the same player and it was a 2x player it could burn the video which is 60 minutes long in 30 minutes.

60 minute video = 1x
dvd player/burn writes at 2x

60/2 = 30

Now you also have to see that your discs can burn that fast, if not the burner will write at the Disc's highest speed.

It has now changed to which a DVD player can read hiigher than 1x, so x just means the speed of video playback.

Edit:
What I said works with everything. Printed DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-ROMs. Players, and Burners.

So if you have a 6x DVD-ROM than it can be read 6 times faster than DVD Video Playback.

The answers post by the user, for information only, RunQA.com does not guarantee the right.


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