Home made dvd's freeze in vehicle's player

LivingTheDream wrote on 5/2/2010, 10:53 PM

I searched the forum and couldn't find anything on this, so if there's already a good thread on it please point me in the right direction.

My home-burned dvd's will play fine in a vehicle's onboard dvd player until they get into the latter part of the video. Then the action will freeze for 2-3 seconds and restart at a later point. This happens more frequently as the movie continues, freezing up like that about every 5-10 seconds even when the vehicle is parked.

The vehicle is not that old, a 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

This happens with either 16:9 or 4:3 NTSC std def dvds made using Vegas 8.0c and DVDA. Main Concept MPEG-2 files with bit rates from 6.4Mbs - 7.5Mbs on Tyo Yuden 4.7G DVD-R discs. AC3 @ 448kbps.

The vehicle's player will play wide screen movies. Store bought dvd's play fine in the player without freezing up at any time. My home burned movies play without any problem in set-top dvd players, never had any complaints.

The vehicle's owners manual says it will play CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, and DVD-RW discs and MPEG-2 compression needs to be used for video. The manual also says "If you record a disc using a personal computer, there may be cases where the player may not be able to play some or the entire disc, even if it is recorded in a compatible format and is playable on other players."

Has anyone out there had experience getting home-burned discs to play with 100% success in onboard vehicle dvd players? Or are they just too tempermental? Maybe a lower bit rate is needed? Or burn the disc at a very slow speed? I can do some experimenting but I wanted to check here first to see if anyone has a definite solution for this to maybe save some time.

Steve

Comments

Grazie wrote on 5/2/2010, 11:37 PM

Lower VBR and a "higher" lower bitrate normally cures this for me.

Grazie

farss wrote on 5/2/2010, 11:50 PM

As above plus use good media, Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim.

Bob.

Grazie wrote on 5/2/2010, 11:59 PM

As above plus a change of vehicle. It's amazing what a brand new vehicle can do.

Grazie

Byron K wrote on 5/3/2010, 2:42 AM

If you can burn at a slower speed, try burning at the slowest speed the burner can burn at.

craftech wrote on 5/3/2010, 4:48 AM

It's possible the problem lies with the audio track. The bitrate may be too high for the audio system in your vehicle. Lower it to 256 kb/s

Also, if the disc is really full (to the edges), lower the bitrate so it takes up less space.

John

LivingTheDream wrote on 5/3/2010, 8:51 AM

Thank you all for your input. I'm already using TY discs and never had a problem with them. I'll experiment a bit with lower bit rates for both video and audio. I think having them buy a brand new vehicle may be outside of their budget, but thanks for the idea anyway Grazie.

Steve

Laurence wrote on 5/3/2010, 11:43 AM

Keep in mind that the way a disc reads is from the inside spiraling out towards the edges. As you go further towards the outside edge, each revolution is spreading the data out more thinly as the length covered with each revolution increases.

This is the reason you (and most other people) have trouble with glitches towards the end of the disc.

Lowering the bitrate does two things:

1/ It means that your DVD player has less actual data to read.
2/ Since there is less data being written to the disc, you don't end up going as far towards the outside edge where you get problems.

I would try the following things:

1/ Write your discs at 4x instead of the faster speeds. My experience is that 4x is the sweet spot. Higher or lower burn rates can have problems with some players.
2/ Lower your bitrate. If you aren't already using AC3 switch to that. I usually don't go above 6000 for general distribution. Use constant bitrate instead of variable so that there aren't data intensive sections in the disk that are likely to glitch.
3/ Try different types of disks. Try +R if you are using -R.
4/ Write two shorter length DVDs instead of one long one.
5/ Try a dual layer disk so as not to write as far toward the edges.
6/ Try different makes of disk. Ty Yuden are usually the best, but maybe your Jeep works better with something else.

Keep in mind that your screen in the Jeep is relatively small and on a small screen like this the lower bitrates are going to look fine (especially bouncing around off-road when you use the 4WD ;-) ).