Odd end actions

Zulqar-Cheema wrote on 9/17/2004, 2:23 AM
Having just done some end actions on some wedding trailers, i am finding some odd results on different DVD playback machines

On a Phillips, it plays the same trailer twice before moving on to the next one, the next chapter button works OK.

On a Toshiba it plays them one at a time, but the next (or back) chapter does not work.

I have made a menu page that is not accessible from the main menu and put the trailers on it and then linked them together, there is a menu page that is accesable that allows you to manually select the clip you want..

Any reason why the two DVD players would interpret the information differently?

Comments

ScottW wrote on 9/17/2004, 5:10 AM
What version of DVDA?
Zulqar-Cheema wrote on 9/26/2004, 8:43 AM
2.0
johnmeyer wrote on 9/26/2004, 12:40 PM
Generally your problem is the result of the fact that DVD Architect takes separate MPEG files (I assume each of your "wedding trailers" are encoded into separate MPEG-2 files) and puts them into separate "titlesets." You can tell whether this is the case by looking at the VIDEO_TS directory that DVD Architect prepares. If you find just VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB, etc. then you have just one titleset. However, if you have VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB followed by VTS_02_1.VOB, VTS_02_2.VOB, followed by VTS_03_1.VOB, VTS_03_2.VOB, etc., then you have multiple titlesets.

The problem is that, even with end actions, various players do not seem to handle titleset end actions the same. I personally believe that this is a bug in how DVD Architect prepares the DVD, and have submitted the problem to Sony as a bug report (which I encourage you to do as well). I do not have the same problem with commercially prepared DVDs.

You will probably also find that when you press the chapter advance button (or chapter back), that you may not be able to advance to the next titleset. This is a little muddier problem in that apparently not all DVD players cause the chapter advance to also act as a title advance button.

A workaround is insert a "Music Compilation" into your project, and then the MPEG files into that compilation. This is described here:

Music Compilation

However, you cannot insert chapter stops inside of each MPEG file once it is inside the music compilation, and also all the audio has to be encoded the same.

The "ultimate" solution -- one that I ask Sony to do every time this problem comes up (and it comes up A LOT in this forum) is to provide the ability to join the MPEG files together (which DVDA could do as part of the prepare process, with very little extra time required). You would then have one titleset.

In the meantime, you can do this joining yourself, prior to importing to DVDA, using Womble's MPEG VCR or MPEG Wizard. (You can also use TMPGEnc's join feature, although I have found it flaky with VBR MPEG files).