I keep finding the quirkiest things!

plasmavideo wrote on 11/15/2005, 7:29 AM

OK,

Here's another odd thing I wish someone could explain.

I've made a DVD with motion thumbnails in the main menu. The thumbnails are 17 second long loops. When I preview the menu, everything looks fine. When I burn the DVD, it plays back fine on each computer I've played it back on. When I look at the DVD on a Panasonic unit in the den, the thumbnail runs for 17 seconds, then instead of looping back to 00:00, it plays back the last several seconds of the loop over and over again for about 13 seconds and then loops back to the beginning again. During that 13 seconds, the player won't allow me to do any action, play - stop, etc.

It looks like it's wanting 30 seconds of a menu loop before it will do anything, and a 17 second loop freaks it out.

I brought the DVD in to work, and it does the same thing on the Panasonic player/recorders here. Unfortunately, that's the only brand we have here, so until I get to someone's house with a different brand, I won't know if it's a player quirk or not. Seems like it's done this same thing on another DVD I did, and I just eliminated the motion menu altogether.

Does anyone have any experience with this situation? Does the 30 seconds have anything to do with it, or is that just perhaps co-incidence? I'll try burning the same project again with a longer loop to see, but I wanted to "ask the experts" first.

Thanks.

Tom

Comments

plasmavideo wrote on 11/15/2005, 8:55 AM

UPDATE #1

Well, I tried the DVD in 3 more Panasonics and found a Sony player. In all of the Panasonics, the problem occurs. In the Sony, it plays normally!

So, my question now is - is it a quirk in the Panasonics, or is it a quirk in DVDA that is causing the problem in the Panasonic players?

ScottW wrote on 11/15/2005, 9:24 AM

I think it's a quirk in the panasonic players - I couldn't reproduce this on a Samsung player I have; used both DVDA and DVD Lab Pro to author - no difference; played fine.

I'd suggest going ahead with your 30 second test - make your menu video something like 45 seconds and see if the Panasonic plays it correctly.

This is an interesting thing to note for playability though.

--Scott

rsp wrote on 11/15/2005, 11:27 AM

Would also like to think it has to do with the dvd player: recently made a loop which worked near perfect on one Sony dvd-player but not so very perfect on 2 other Sony's which was quitte disappointing.

If there is a 'formula' to work out the 'perfect loop time' i would be very interested to learn about it !

Rudi

plasmavideo wrote on 11/15/2005, 7:01 PM

I'm now reporting more wierdness after some tests.

I changed the motion menu to 60 seconds looping, and it plays fine in my Panasonic player.

Next, I burned a small test DVD using the Ulead DVD authoring and burning software that came with the Pioneer burner. I had a 20 second looping menu thumbnail.

Guess what. It played back fine on the Panasonic player, so it's looking like something the Panasonic doesn't like about the short loop menu made by DVDA.

I notice in DVDA that when you set up a loop, you can either take a "calculated" loop time, which in this case defaulted to :30 or you can tell it how long to make it. I'm wondering if that's an indicator of the problem.

I'm going to CC this thread to tech support in case it's a bug or something I just don't understand.

Anyway, enough tests. I'm going to walk the dog and then go to bed.

Nite, all.

plasmavideo wrote on 11/16/2005, 8:26 PM

Well, here's the next chapter (no pun intended).

I burned the DVD with the 1 minute thumbnails. Everything seemed to be fine - BUT: I went to the first video file which was 19 minutes long. I had a scene selection menu (static thumbnails) and played the last scene. At the end of the scene, which was about 2 minutes in length, the video did the same crazy thing on the Panasonic player, where it was supposed to return to the last menu, but instead started playing the last several seconds over and over again before finally returning to the menu. The other video on the disc, which was 55 minutes in length worked fine! I see no differences in menu structure or end methods or anything else to account for this, and both of the videos were encoded exactly the same way. And both play fine on the computer based DVD player.

In case there is any possible connection, I will mention that both videos were originally edited using the Canopus CODEC in Edius. A master file was made from the timeline, which was then brought into Vegas for audio sweetening and encoding to mpg.

Crazy, huh!

plasmavideo wrote on 11/18/2005, 7:19 AM

Is it possible that he problem I am describing could be related to the fact that the Vegas timeline is displaying things in SMPTE drop frame, and DVDA's timeline is set to SMPTE non-drop frame? I just discovered this and have set the DVDA timeline to :Time" rather than SMPTE. Is the difference confusing things in the project, or is that setting merely for display purposes?

plasmavideo wrote on 11/18/2005, 8:57 AM

Well, here's my last report with still nothing definate and no word yet from tech support.

I did several things that just deepen the mystery.

1. I changed the DVDA timeline to read time in mins and seconds instead of SMPTE.

2. I added several seconds of black to the 19 minute video that was having trouble with the end repeating over and over before going back to the menu and re=rendered.

3. I changed the end action to return to a specific menu instead of most recent menu.

The only thing that changed on the burned DVD on the Panasonic player was that the end of the video only looped for a couple of times before going back to the menu, so I'm concluding it must be some kind of strange timing thing with Panasonic that was affected by adding the extra couple of seconds of black, but why the DVD burned with the Ulead software (granted, it was authored differently) did not exhibit the problem, I have no idea.

If I ever figure it out, you'll be the first to know - after my wife, who's tired of hearing me scream after every trial DVD that failed.