DVDA bug and fix.

ScottW wrote on 7/19/2006, 7:23 PM

Oh please get over it. if you really weren't up for dying a thousand deaths from time to time you woudn''t have handed your client a DVD at all, you would have given them a VHS tape.

If it's not one thing, it's another with DVD's - maybe it wasn't this particular issue, maybe the clients machine just didn't like burned media (there's lots out there that don't) - what do you do then???? Maybe it stalls during playback because you encoded at too high a bit rate and the player can't handle the errors. Well, it must be Sony's fault.

Wait, I know, we bitch about how Sony didn't anticipate the fact that machines would be created which wouldn't play burned DVD media or couldn't correctly cope with something that 90% of the rest of the players on the market could, and how it's clearly Sony's fault that they didn't fix this right away.

I guess my poitnt is that unless you personally go out and test your DVD against every available DVD player on the market (and even those no longer on the market), there is absolutely no way you are going to be able to ensure 100% no issues with playability. It simply will not happen. Not even if you spend $25,000 and purchase a copy of Scenarist. I still remember when Disney recalled a bunch of DVD's because they pushed the envelope, and they wouldn't play correctly on (at that time) a majority of players - a major blunder, and the DVD was most likely authored with Scenarist.

Is it frustrating - you bet. But that's the way it is, and it's unlikely to change - in fact, I predict things will get much, much worse with the advent of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray which have increased the amount of interactivity available (and subsequently the complexity of the overall creation process).

--Scott

farss wrote on 7/19/2006, 9:16 PM

Scott,
sure there's a risk we all have to take with handing DVDs to clients and yes burnt media is more problematic however as newer machines have replaced older that issue is slowly fading into the past. We could rightly say, look sorry we've done our best but your player just doesn't handle burnt media or it's dying anyway and soon it will not play any media.
However some of us are replicating so the burnt media issue doesn't apply.
Agreed start getting into complex menus etc and the risk of compatibility problems increases and even the big boys have had plenty of issues.
I've had playability issues in the past, I analysed what was going wrong and learnt how to encode to avoid the problem. I keep my DVD structure as simple as it gets as well.
This issue it seems has no work around within DVDA, that's why it's a problem that needs attention.

Bob.

rstein wrote on 7/19/2006, 10:38 PM

Adding my opinion to the fray, I strongly concur with cbrillo and farss.

A known product defect that isn't addressed until the next (you've got to pay to get) version is unacceptable, and is probably actionable on a breach of warranty theory. I'm not a lawyer (yet), but this type of BS really peeves me.

Normally, the Japanese business model is to strive for quality, and to fix problems promptly (with an apology), in stark contrast to what Sony is inimating it's going to do: hold the customer hostage to buy an entirely new product as an upgrade to fix the defect.

It sounds like GM has bought Sony.

Bob.

farss wrote on 7/19/2006, 11:08 PM

For me (and I just know others are going to disgree very strongly) I wouldn't care if I had to pay to get this fixed. In all fairness this quite possibly isn't a problem entirely of Sony's making either.

What I'm unhappy about is the delay in getting it fixed. Tying it to a major release with a whole new potential set of problems leaves one to wonder how much new will be broken. In other words we could take one step forward and two backwards until a few point releases down the track.

Disclaimer: I am a software developer. I don't charge to fix bugs and I don't have a mortgage.

Bob.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 7/20/2006, 4:50 AM

Bob, you've nailed it. We put a disclaimer or warning or whatever you want to call it on our DVD cases that reads:

"We use only high quality DVD-R media to maximize compatibility. The vast majority of DVD players work fine with our DVD-R discs. Still, there are some that may experience problems, especially older models. This compatibility issue does exist for at least 10% of the DVD players in use today. More often than not, the best remedy is to purchase a new DVD player. This is not as outrageous as it may sound. Consider that several quality DVD players, such as those made by Apex, may be purchased at stores like Wal-Mart for under $45.00."

cbrillow wrote on 7/20/2006, 5:11 AM

I agree with you, Bob, that a Sony recommendation to use the 3rd party tool to fix this one specific issue in DVDA-3 would be acceptable, at least, to me. If they could spare the time to investigate and confirm that it is a problem, it would seem that they could spare the time to confirm that the proposed solution works, and give us a little confidence.

For what it's worth, a friend who also uses Vegas/DVDA, downloaded the 'fix' program last night and it did detect the two streams that are causing the problem. He says that it wrote a corrected .ifo file, as-advertised. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to test it on one of the LG models, but this is promising.

cbrillow wrote on 7/20/2006, 5:20 AM

"We put a disclaimer or warning or whatever you want to call it on our DVD cases..."

That's a fine and prudent policy, but this thread isn't about burned media compatibility with older players. It's about DVD the structure produced by DVD Architect -- one which affects new and current players of a specific brand and type. And it's a problem that could also affect replicated DVDs, for which we've spent a lot of extra $ specifically to avoid burned-media incompatibility.

farss wrote on 7/20/2006, 5:24 AM

Jay,
I usually do the same thing but it doesn't help when I hand the client a master that they send off for replication and all the artwork etc is designed by their graphic artist.

And here's how finnicky they get. The disks I master still have to play in a PC that doesn't have a DVD player app installed!

Bob.

JJKizak wrote on 7/20/2006, 5:32 AM

Jay:
That Apex player has a "Huge" qualiity control problem. The repair people treat them like used bathroom tissues.
My family purchased one---and it was really terrible in picture quality.
JJK

Jay Gladwell wrote on 7/20/2006, 6:41 AM

James, that may be true. The ones I've used, among three or four others brands, have shown the picture quality to be fine! But at under $45, it can be treated as bathroom tissue.

For us, so far, we've not run into any compatability issues after hundreds of DVDs.

Chuck, I was addressing something specially that Bob said.

Coursedesign wrote on 7/20/2006, 8:17 AM

$45 for a DVD player???

That's outrageous.

Here they go for as little as $19.95.

A Best Buy guy told me their return rate on Apex players was over 50%...

But there are others such as Norcent. Ugly remotes (aestethically and functionally), but absolutely acceptable quality.

I'm glad DVDSP (Final Cut Studio) at least knows to put chapter markers on I-frames only.

I do have a serious, practical concern (for me) that Sony is not really committed to serving the pro community where people's living depends on having reliable tools.

It's so much easier to create an exciting product for prosumers, where it's OK if there are glitches that hold people up for a couple of months while the developers are looking for the optimum release target.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 7/20/2006, 8:19 AM

Bjorn, I said under $45.

I do have a serious, practical concern (for me) that Sony is not really committed to serving the pro community where people's living depends on having reliable tools.

Agreed! That's why I asked... attempted to ask, Sony who their target market was for Vegas. Alas, no reply, just as Grazie prophised.

eyethoughtso wrote on 7/20/2006, 3:49 PM

-Sony recommendation to use the 3rd party tool to fix this one specific issue in DVDA-3 would be acceptable, at least, to me. -

So does anyone know what the3rd party tool is? Who makes it? Where do we get it?

apit34356 wrote on 7/20/2006, 4:37 PM

Farss, thanks for the "headsup" about DVDA3. I had assume "falsely" that DVDA3 was stable. Don't really use it, except for a couple of times. Assumed errors with different players was more a media/burner that DVDA3. I quess I should be more careful about stating how strong the Sony vegas family software is.

corug7 wrote on 7/20/2006, 9:25 PM

I just recently purchased a $25.00 Cyberhome dvd player for my kids. It plays back just about everything, with reasonable picture quality, and it can be made region-free with a simple remote hack. Compare this to my $400.00 pioneer HDD/DVD recorder which won't even playback my older DVD-VR recordings, let alone anything PAL or Region 2-9.

NickHope wrote on 7/20/2006, 10:25 PM

http://www.videohelp.com/~r0lZ/pgcedit/index.html

Downloading it now. Will let you know what it does.

Nick

edit: The PcgEdit fix looks like a piece of cake. Just ran it, opened my DVD folder, and immediately it came back with this:

There are 1 audio streams defined for the Menu domain in the VMGM_MAT table of the VMGM.

I'll "fix" some, burn some DVDs and let you know if they play in players.

Nick

newhope wrote on 7/20/2006, 11:01 PM

I've finally used PCGEdit on some Menu based DVDA projects and it does fix the problem with my LG DVD Recorder.
You can still use DVDA to burn the DVDs after fixing the contents of the DVD folder created by DVDA with PGCEdit.

OK Sony DVDA3 is still current and has an admitted fault.
Time to come up with a fix prior to DVDA4 is released... you have heard the term Class Action when referring to legal cases for damages haven't you?

Stephen Hope
New Hope Media

NickHope wrote on 7/21/2006, 2:27 AM

Well, with cousin Stephen and I both involved, there's plenty of Hope for all of us...

I did the one-click PcgEdit fix on a couple of my more complex DVD projects, burnt them, and they play fine in WinDVD and on my Sharp and Pioneer set-top DVD players (not recorders).

One thing to note is that PcgEdit leaves a backup folder in your VIDEO_TS folder, even if you don't do the fix or save anything. It takes up space so I deleted that before burning.

I bet that DVDA does not actually do anything that's expressly outside the specs, just that they never envisaged that hardware would be stupid enough to care about their tiny redundant streams. Conversely I bet LG never envisaged that software would be stupid enough to make redundant streams in the first place.

Personally I don't care too much as I'm burning my DVDs and can fix this right away, but if I'd had a large batch made I'd be extremely miffed about this.

ScottW wrote on 7/21/2006, 9:27 AM

Not that anyone probably cares, since clearly folks want to lynch...

This little issue has been around with audio streams since DVDA 1.0.

Dazza wrote on 9/8/2006, 6:45 AM

Given that apparently there is a new version of DVDA (4) about to be released does anyone know if this "navigation error" problem has been fixed please?

ScottW wrote on 9/8/2006, 7:33 AM

I believe that Nick indicated at one point that in his discussion with Sony it was indicated it would not be fixed in the initial release of 4, but in the first update.

--Scott

ken c wrote on 9/8/2006, 8:06 AM

I use DVDA to create the DVD source files, but I burn them to DVD masters using Nero, I don't know if that would help?

ken

ScottW wrote on 9/8/2006, 8:39 AM

Doesn't help unless Nero were to also detect the error and correct it; AFAIK, Nero doesn't. You need to use PGCedit prior to burning and tell it to go ahead and fix the error.

--Scott

ForumAdmin wrote on 9/20/2006, 12:37 PM

We have been looking into this issue and it has proven more involved than originally thought. Unfortunately we will not be able to resolve it in time for a 4.0a update release.

If this is something we fix in a future update, I will post to this thread and let everyone know.

I do want to thank those who brought this issue to our attention.

This info was also posted in the original DVDA thread.

Regards,
DaveS