K3b crashes – Set the software buffer to the same size as the writer’s hardware buffer0

I was experiencing constant crashes with K3b on my default Fedora Core 8(x86_64) installation.

# uname -a
Linux hendrix 2.6.23.1-42.fc8 #1 SMP Tue Oct 30 13:18:33 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# k3b -v
Qt: 3.3.8
KDE: 3.5.8-7.fc8 Fedora
K3b: 1.0.5

There were 3 crash times I noted:
1) Anywhere from 50% progress to “closing the session” on the write phase the software would just freeze.
2) It would hang during data verification, the GUI is left frozen. Ejecting media and reinserting have no effect. (In this case the data was fine on the written media, but not verified.).
3) Recording would fail early during writing showing an error message asking you to set max locked memory to unlimited (ulimit -l unlimited) (Not a crash per se, but I lost some media because of it.). Setting ulimit -l did not avoid this problem completely, I still got this after setting max locked memory to unlimited on some instances.

After messing around with the buffer sizes and other settings I ended up with a 2 MB software buffer size. I noticed this value matched the hardware buffer size on my LG writer. This may be purely coincidental, but the crashes stopped after the software buffer size matched that of the writer.

I’m also running k3b from the command line after setting ulimit -l unlimited as suggested, just in case, but this did not avoid media loss earlier. I burned 8 CD’s and 11 DVD’s since and had no recurring problems.