How to burn DVDs faster?

I have a sony vaio laptop with windows 7 and I have been using windows dvd maker to burn dvds, mostly from torrent files. My problem is, It is averaging about 2 hours to burn a dvd. Actually, it only takes a few minutes to burn but it takes forever to encode. Then, after it is burnt and encoded, if i try to make another copy later, it has to re-encode it? is this normal and is there any way I can burn more efficiently, either with a better program or just a different method? Thanks in advance! Oh, also, I have had 2 movies in the past two days burn with no audio? In the dvd preview, right before i burn, it has sound and there is nothing wrong, but then, when it burns, i put it in and there is no sound to it?! This is quite frustrating after waiting two hours to burn a single dvd, then to put it in and there is no sound! It's also quite a waste of discs. Can anyone help with either problem?