Compatibility issues

David_White wrote on 2/27/2004, 11:25 AM
Having just completed my first DVD project with DVDA I am disappointed to find that the DVD does not play on all players. First, I am using the Plextor PX-708A DVD burner and DVDA does not even recognize that there is a drive when attempting to burn to the DVD- format. However, it will burn to DVD+ format although, after burning the DVD with DVDA, the drive will not play the DVD it has just created. The DVD however plays fine on some, not all, DVD players and Playstation devices. Having read some of the threads on this forum I realize that I am not alone. I attempted to use Roxio to burn the DVDA prepared files but since the audio and video are rendered separately for DVDA the audio was lost within Roxio. If I have to render straight into MPEG-2 format and use Roxio to burn the DVD's then why did I spend the money on DVDA? Also, when previewing the DVD within DVDA the video is very choppy even at best quality although when the DVD is burned it plays properly. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated while I still have some hair left. Does anyone from SONY support read these forums?

Comments

ScottW wrote on 2/27/2004, 1:34 PM
Well, without trying to sound like I'm defending DVDA.. The choppyness during preview is pretty common. Depending on what you're previewing, DVDA may be doing quite a bit of work behind the scenes in order to simulate a prepared project. For example, if you have a menu with a background video/audio along with an animated thumbnail or 2 or 3, DVDA is having to mux all of these video streams together real-time for presentation (and in the case of thumbnails it's also having to scale the video etc.) So DVDA's success in doing this is dependant on things like processor power, disks, etc. No doubt there's some things that could be done in software to improve this situation though.

I've seen a couple of different people report the problem with the drive not being seen unless +R media is inserted. I think Sony support has said basically if the drive isn't on the DVDA list of supported drives, then you're on your own. Since the drive list is so old, we can only hope that the next release of DVDA will address these shortcomings.

The problem with +R media only playing on some players isn't DVDA's fault - it's the fault of the player. Each DVD has encoded on it a "book type" that tells what the media is. Stamped DVD's have a type of DVD-ROM, -R is DVD-R, etc. Some players look at the media type and will only play the media if it's a type they recognize (usually at least DVD-ROM). I think the figures are something like 85% of the players will play -R (so even -R which is a format recognized by the DVD Forum isn't universally playable). Now, +R media does allow the burner to specify the book type when the DVD is burnt (-R doesn't allow this), so I've had good luck using the DVD Bitsetter utility (from dvdplusrw.org) on my burner to tell it to write the type as DVD-ROM. Unfortunately, not all burners allow the type to be set and none of the dual format burners (afaik) allow this.

What I've done is invested in a copy of DVDlab to compliment DVDA. DVDA is great for a lot of things, but if I need something like the ability to set an end action, or if I have a complex menu setup to do, I'll use DVDlab - even though it's harder to do things like animated thumbnails in DVDlab (since lab is a lower level type authoring program, you have to do the individual steps that DVDA can hide from you).

--Scott

wobblyboy wrote on 2/28/2004, 8:08 PM
Not true, if you look at the audio_ts folder you will see nothing there. I have burned DVDA files with DVD Clone and it works fine. I just point DVD Clone at the video_ts file and it burns just fine. As I have mentioned before on other threads, I took DVDA burned disks to electronic store and played fine all all settops in the store. I am using TDK and Pioneer burners and burning -r discs.

If you don't have DMA transfer mode set on your disks, you will have choppy preview on MPRG files, both in Vegas and DVDA. Start, settings, control panel, system, hard discs, properties, check DMA transfer mode.

You might also see if you need to load latest firmward for you burner.