CD burner does not respect burn speed?

Thanks for your bug. Could you get a debug log by changing the "/apps/nautilus-cd-burner/debug" gconf key and running nautilus-cd-burner from a command line? You should have the details of the cdrecord call by example

x@x:~$ gconftool -R /apps/nautilus-cd-burner
 burnproof = false
 temp_iso_dir =
 debug = true
 overburn = false
 default_speed = 2

Thanks for the tip (I would have never have found the gconf key). Here's the cdrecord output. The pertitinent part is this:
cdrecord blank stdout: Starting to write CD/DVD at speed 4 in real BLANK mode for single session.

It seems that the log only has the blank command, which uses the fast option, it's probably normal to not have any speed used for it. Could you copy the log for the CD record too?

"it's probably normal to not have any speed used for it [the blank command]"

I beg to differ. If a CD can't be burned at a faster burn speed you can't blank it at a faster burn speed either. Believe me I've tried. The only way you can work around the problem is to fix the blank speed too (and in the past nautilus-cd-burner did this).

It turns out that it is impossible to get nautilus-cd-burner not to try and blank the cd before it tries to burn data to the disk. Even when the inserted disk is blank it tries to blank it anyway...

I've forwarded your issue upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340941

Don't want to start another bug for this, because this is related:

Nautilus CD burner does not seem to recognize the maximum burn speeds of my drive / the cd's to be burned.

If I right click the cd icon on the desktop and select Copy Disc, I can choose a write speed from the menu. The choices go as high as 11x which I think my drive doesn't even support. Furthermore if I select Maximum possible the burn process allways fails and I get a message like 'try to use slower write speed'.

Should the Maximum possible first evaluate the capabilities of the drive and then the disc, or how does it work?

My drive is QSI CD-RW/DVD-ROM SBW242B and it has these capabilities according to device manager:

storage.cdrom.write_speed : 1762 (0x6e2)

I don't know what does that 1762 mean and my laptop's manual didn't mention the speed of the drive but I believe that it was something like 4x for CD-RW and not much more with CD-R. So the list should not go as high as 11x...

Still here in Feisty.

Version Information:
Ubuntu Feisty
nautilus-cd-burner 2.17.8-0ubuntu1

Can you reproduce the problem in gutsy? If so, please install cdrskin (sudo apt-get install cdrskin), link cdrskin binary
against cdrecord (temporary) and try burning. Please let me know the result. Thank you.

I'm sure that this is still here (I've just tested Gutsy Tribe 4). Here's the output from a machine with a better CD burner:
launching command: wodim dev=/dev/scd0 -v blank=fast
wodim stderr: scsidev: '/dev/scd0'
wodim stderr: devname: '/dev/scd0'
<snip>
launching command: wodim fs=16m speed=28 dev=/dev/scd0 -eject -dao driveropts=burnfree -v -data -nopad /tmp/image.iso.R2H1XT
wodim stderr: scsidev: '/dev/scd0'

Notice how the speed is not passed to the blanking section but it is passed to the image burning phase.

Version information:
nautilus-cd-burner 2.19.6-0ubuntu2

This bug has become invalid upstream because natilus-cd-burner has been replaced by Brasero. I don't use the computer which I saw this problem on much now so let's resolve this issue invalid here for now.