In my opinion (and from others) Americal is not a good store to buy media. Bait and switch, fakes we have found from them in our media data base ..

without publishing the media code -- the disk model and name is meaningless ..
get some good disks like ritek or apple disks or Taiyo Yuden and others .. see here http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

I've had similar problems, looking at the bitrate shows it seems to relate to fast jumps in the bitrate or spike over the average limits. Try setting the max bitrate down 500K/sec on the encoder.
Of course the media also seems to play a big part as does the player.
Bob.

Yes, I have had the same problem in my last three projects. All of these are musicals that are around 90 minutes and about the 4 gig range. I'm getting skipping at very end very frustrating...I fixed it with DVD decrypter.

-Randy

I just burned a disk image to a Ritek at 4x (almost full disk) and made a coaster.

I burned the same image to a cheap Mitsumi which my Toshiba will only burn at 1x even though it is a 4x and Nero thinks it is burning at 4x.

That worked fine.

Then I tried another Ritek at 2x and it worked.

I also did the same with a data dvd at almost full capacity. The Riteks failed twice in a row.
So I deleted about 200MB and burned to a Maxell with no problems.

So you may have a point with both slower burn speeds and a lesser capacity.

EDIT When I say they failed, what I mean is that they completed OK but when the DVD tries to read them, the light just flashes forever and never recognizes the disk.

if you go back over old posts of mine - i also dont usually recommend riteks anymore , but some people still like/use them and they are better than a lot of others still ..

"In my opinion (and from others) Americal is not a good store to buy media. Bait and switch, fakes we have found from them in our media data base .."

TOO right!... after my post i took a look a closer look. The disc i received were hub printable.. I didn't want that.. i figured i ordered the wrong pn in error.. Well i just went back to americal.. I ORDERED the right discs THEY SENT ME different ones.!!..

I emailed them about it.. will let you know what they said..

THANKS for that post/link b JM!! very informative!

I was told on the dv.com dvd forum that ritek ridata disks were about the best you could buy. Have you heard differently?

"I fixed it with DVD decrypter."

I'm sorry, I must be ignorant, b/c I've never heard of decrypter. What is it and how did it fix your problem?

Thanks!

Musman,

DVD Decrypter is free program that allows you to take your VOD files and fix problems such as this. When you receive program load up your files to program then go to CSS tab. Under Cracking method (hit brut force). This has fixed my problems 100% of the time. Here is the link:

DVD DECRYPTER

Hope this works!!
Randy
Vild Productions

Sorry to be a contrarian (again) but in my experience it makes absolutely no difference if you burn to the very limits.

I have done literally hundreds (about 400) of DVD-R disks over the past two years. All were done with Ritek G04 blanks, burned at 4x with a Pioneer 105 burner. About 125 of those disks hold 4.696,483,840 bytes. If you assume the absolute limit is 4,700,000,000 bytes, then that's 99.93% of full. Another 125 of those disks hold 4,679,325,696 bytes, or 99.56% of full. I pulled these numbers just now from the Properties page on my system.

The first disk holds 2.5 hours of video, so the implied average bitrate is around 4Mb/sec. The second disk holds 2 hours, for a bitrate of 5Mb/sec. The Ritek blanks came from several internet sites, www.meritline.com and www.supermediastore.com. They were bought for about $0.40 each in quantities of 100.

All of these disks have full-face Meritline glossy labels, printed with pigment inks on an Epson C80 printer. Every single one of these disks has played fine, according to my clients, with three exceptions. Two of those instances were with old DVD players that would not play any DVD-R disk. The third was a PS2 console that could read a +R disk.

What can I say? I have burned right to the limits with absolutely no issues. Several years ago when I first began burning DVD-R blanks, I bought some "GQ" disks from the local Fry's. It was obvious from looking at the edge with a 10x magnifying lens that there were some nonuniformities. By contrast, the Ritek blanks are absolutely uniform.

Interesting stuff, thank you for that! Is this somehting you use all the time? Do you lose any quality using it? I'll have to do more research as the site talked mostly about ripping dvds. That's not really my thing.
Thanks again!

Well i download Disc Info app...
Manufacturer is listed as TYG02 - which apparently is one of the "good" makers...

Is there any way to test for "fakes" manuf ideas?

And - no response yet from Amercial on them sending me the wrong discs.
- recall discs i ordered were NOT shown/described as hub printable.

(just a note: nice to have such a wonderful community to share experiences on everything related to video:)

they really have not kept up then in current dvd blank disk happenings ..

riteks for the last 6 months have had a number of problems....

there are better choices currently ... (but riteks are still better than many other brands) ..

this is not heresay -- but the feedback of 100's of thousands of users on our forums in which we track this data ... in fact , 2 million unique hits a month ..


right now (besides the huge number of fake riteks showing up) , now a lot of fake TY's are showing up as well ..

TY02's are good --

fakes are hard to tell - sometimes only sending them to who made them to check if real or not ..

TY fakes often have a laser etched code in the hub that doesnt match real ones - but this is not a given .