burning DVD

desherm wrote on 2/21/2004, 5:29 PM

Have menu-based DVD compiled with DVDA. Works great in PREVIEW.
But after rendering for 2 hours the finished DVD plays for 46 seconds then freezes.
Any ideas on what may have gone wrong?
I would be most grateful.

Thanks,

Dan

Comments

riredale wrote on 2/21/2004, 5:43 PM

You're talking about playing the finished burned disk, right?

I don't have much experience with DVD-A, but in my experience I've had "freezing" problems whenever I set my bitrate too high. If I use an average no higher than about 8Mb/sec, the burned disk plays fine. And of course, it could also be a bad disk, or a bad burn.

TVCmike wrote on 2/21/2004, 5:57 PM

First off, what kind of media are you using? I'm talking not only the type of writeable (DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM), but brand (Ritek, Verbatim, MAM-A, Khypermedia). Often times, you need high quality media for proper playback. Some cheaper media actually has defects on it and doesn't work well. I'm also assuming the disc has no finger prints, scratches, or other visible anomalies. Knowing what writer you used might be useful but that usually isn't an issue.

The next question is what player are you using? Certain players, particularly older standalone DVD players, have trouble playing writeable media. If you wrote the DVD, you should have software to be able to play back from your computer's DVD-ROM and see if it works. That would be a useful piece of information.

After all that, you need to check are some of the rudimentary DVD compatibility issues. Have you encoded the MPEG-2 in a standard resolution and framerate? Have you encoded the audio with Dolby Digital AC3 or PCM audio, and not MPEG-1 Layer II? Is it a single file or are you using multiple MPEG-2 files? What authoring software and encoding software did you use?

Those are just some things I can think of off the top of my head. If you can post that info and check, it'd help track down your problem.

johnmeyer wrote on 2/23/2004, 2:44 PM

I have experienced exactly the problem you describe when trying to play DVDA authored discs on an older Sony set-top DVD player. I don't think the fault lies with DVDA.

I just had someone return one of these disks. It plays fine on my Pioneer DV-525. I am now going to do a DVD copy to the "ultimate" DVD-R media, the Maxell 2x branded media. It has come out on top on several media compatibility tests. I'm then going to send it back to the client and see if it plays. This will tell me if it is a media problem.

If the disk still won't play, then I'm going to encode at a lower bitrate.

I have sent this client many disks, and some play, and some don't. I'm finally going to test the variables, one by one, until I figure out exactly why some will play perfectly, while others will quit after 10-30 seconds.