data rate cos I though that would be less of a strain on PC
I'll say it's the other way around. The preview just flips an image onto the screen that is on a GPU surface anyway. The GPU is highly optimised for that.
The data rate causes a bit of stress to the CPU. But both shouldn't really matter.
Would you recommend uninstalling everything I can and reinstall from original disc then add any updates?
Normally, no. Whatever old drivers you still have there are wasting space on your drive but they don't get to play actively.
What about the dubious "resulting size" numbers and the fact I can tell by looking at them whether or not I will get a backup with an SL blank or need to go to DL? Don't see how that relates to video card.....Just put "The Game" (1997 Douglas) in and will crash if I attempt to put it on SL disc (2 Hour+ movie) but will back up fine on a DL disc. Also the ETA is way out of whack (almost 3 hours) when I attempt to do a 2 hour SL and 1/3 of that on a DL that works.
The ETA is almost impossible to really get right. A DVD is simple: there's one video format, one resolution, one codec.
Bluray has 3 different video codecs, 6 (I think) different possible resolutions, not counting aspect ratio, highly varying bitrates, so it's really, really hard to predict timing.
Will probably get improved in the future.
As I said before: there is a difference between the size slider being at full right position and otherwise.
Full right: no compression, just take the video as is from the disc and copy (remove unselected streams, but that's all).
Otherwise: holy cow, CPU is going to be busy.
It's a difference like day and night. Two completely different operations (they actually don't even share a single line of code in the program). First option mostly stresses reading and writing, second will put full load on all your 8 cores. And also utilizes your GPU, though not really heavily.
What CloneBD does with your graphics card is mainly YUV-RGB conversion, pixel shader (to blend in subtitles and such).
Is this how the cloneBD is designed? Why can't it go on an SL blank?
Well, it can. For pretty much everybody.
The thing is: you will hardly find any application other than video processing, that will really make full use of your rig. Not even gaming.
So the fact, that nothing ever happens, unless you use CloneBD, only tells you that your PC is fine as long as you don't ask for much.
As someone here in the thread wrote: he had similar issues using - was it BDRebuilder? Also taking his PC down. A user mode application can't do that, that's the main design goal of an operating system.
But in your case, it's more likely just the graphics card. Do you have another (different) one, just to swap and see if things go differently then?
:clap: