Hey thanks...thats what I was looking for.

IN regards though..when you say encode at 4.5 to 6mb...are you saying the setting in Vegas?

Also..have you found that DVD-R is more compatable?

I usually do about 60-90 minutes on each...the key is to keep a couple hundred megs free at the end of the disk. If you burn errors, more than likely it'll be at the end of the disk where imbalance problems are more likely.

FWIW, I usually do a VBR of 6k-8k

The DVDA NTSC / PAL templates for the MC encoder should give you reliable results. I can't speak for the US but down under I'm seeing less and less problems with DVD - Rs not playing. The players are so cheap these days, in fact not much more than we sell DVDs for you can almost suggest the customer buy one just to watch the DVD.

Also don't assume pressed DVDs will solve all the problems with player issues, even many of the Hollywood releases will not play properly on some players.

Bob.

Bob.

Well, the problem I am having now is that I did a wedding video that was 1hr 28 min. AT first, I used a DVD+R and it did not play on the parent's player. I used the DVD-Compatablity web site and found that DVD-R work. I gave them one and it played fine until about an hour or so in. It started to pixelate and then stopped all together.
I also used NERO 6 to burn it and used the "High Quality" mode which is the highest one. I will to bump down to "Standard" and see if that helps.

Thanks!!! I appreciate your help!

Earlier this year I had a run of 50 DVD-Rs done by JC Media Services, including artwork on printable discs.

Prices were very good and I did not have one return for incompatibility or failure to play.

Try contacting Jason Bellisle [jason{AT}jcmediaservices.com]

Ralph, you might want to edit your post and "munge" Jason's email address somehow, like change the @ sign to "- at - " and the .com to dot.com so that spammers' harvesting robots won't pick it up. You won't be doing the guy much of a favor if you cause his email address to get hammered with spam. ;)

It's OK, I have good spam blocking on my server :)

I wish Sony would undertake and publish a study on how to make disks more compatible. It would be a great marketing tool for them, since they sell the burners, the media, and the software tools to create the discs.

Unfortunately, many compatibility stories are based on urban legend, or at best, an experience where one disk didn't work, and then a later one did (when played on the same equipment), and the only thing that the person could remember changing was the bitrate, or the authoring software, or the burning software, or the media, or the maximum bitrate, or ...

The excellent media compatibility survey found at dvdrhelp.com (DVDrHelp Media Search), is unfortunately a main contributor to this problem. This is a self-reported survey, and is definitely very useful for helping find media to avoid, but it also helps build a group consensus around theories like the low bitrate theory. This is not to say that it couldn’t be true that high bitrates reduce compatibility, only that there has been no actual scientific evidence to back up this idea.

The ONLY test I have seen that was a valid, scientific test, was the one published in DV Magazine two years ago by Ralph LeBarge (also published in DVD Today -- DVD Compatibility Test). While that test, and subsequent remarks by LeBarge have suggested that bitrate may be a factor in compatibility with some players, I have yet to see one test that actually confirms this.

The one CLEAR factor in compatibility is media. LeBarge's test put Maxell at the top of the list, but that test was two years ago, and you cannot easily find the 2x Maxell media used in that test. In recent interviews, LeBarge said that his current testing (which he only publishes privately for profit), reveals that "name brand" media perform substantially better than private label. Thus, if you stick with Sony, TDK, Verbatim, Maxell, and other well-known brands, and if you buy them in branded packaging, you are likely to get media that will be compatible.

If anyone here has any scientific information (i.e., actual test results where all variables are held constant, and only bitrate changed) that proves that bitrate affects compatibility, I'd sure like to see it. I am not a believer in this at all, and in fact, the MPEG spec requires that players be able to read continuously at up to 9,800,000 bits per second (see mpeg.org).

If any of you ever get a disc back from a client that won’t play on their player, please do the following: If you still have the original Vegas project, then — without changing anything — re-encode and re-author, doing everything exactly the same, except encode at a lower bitrate. Then, burn onto the same media with the same burner, and then send it to the client who then plays on the same player. If this new disk works, then please post the results here.

I've had two issues where discs would not play (both were PioData, supposedly unbranded Pioneer -R media). Both had a label. I had the opportunity to give the client an unlabeled (white inkjet-printed) disc, same project, both burned from DVDA 1, and the inkjet-printed disc played fine.

I agree with the disclaimer and offering a VHS alternative. For a higher $ project where you're only delivering one or two discs (for example to brides parents), I would offer to provide a new DVD player. Haven't done that yet, but you don't have to tell them it only cost you $60 or whatever, and can be built into your base project price. Seems radical - but I can imagine that parents would be knocked out by "service" like that.

Of course you would want to check the disks in that specific player before giving it to them.

Sorry I could not resist. I was just imagining how embarrasing it would be if the disks did not work.

I have burned many hundreds of DVD-5 blanks over the past two years. My own personal conclusions are that playability is a factor of medium, burning software, and (maybe) authoring software. I say this because I first had some playability issues that went away when I updated to a more recent version of Nero and when I switched exclusively to Ritek G04 blanks. Since then, not a single problem outside of two issues with very old DVD players and an X-box. I've used a Cendyne/Pioneer 4x burner and recently graduated to an 8x Pioneer, where I'll stay till dual-layer gets cheap (hah!).

I've also concluded that labels have absolutely no effect, assuming you use a "rolling-pin" technique of some other way of assuring that the label is flat, centered, and bubble-free. I don't even think balance is much of an issue. Do you own test: take a working non-labeled disk and apply a small mailing label on one side. Keep applying additinal labels until you have a read failure. I think you'll find that DVDs can take a substantial imbalance before giving problems.

Last year I miscalculated on a project and filled a DVD-5 to 99.5% of capacity. Again, no problems with the 250 disks that went out that way. I would attribute this to the utter reliability of the Ritek media (I bought some "GQ" DVD-R blanks several years ago. You could see dust or pinhole defects in the coating even without the aid of a magnifying lens).

As for bitrate, one needs to differentiate between average and peak. My disks do fine with a peak of about 9.5Mb/sec (average around 6). When I tried to do a CBR disk a couple of years ago with a 9.5 rate, I found that it would play okay, but would turn to crap on fast-forward.

Finally, I think that even though the spec says DVD has to work to about 10Mb/sec, keep in mind that a burned medium might be harder to read than a pressed one, and that might be the reason that burned disks are a bit more tender.

Thanks for the great tips guys.

I burned two DVD-R's.....one the normal way I do it......it locked up about 1 hour into it.

I burned a second one. This time I chose "Standard" in NERO 6. I assume this is the final bitrate that is burned on the DVD. It made it all the way to the credits..Approx. 1hr 25 minutes. I assume that I can burn one with the next level down and possibly make it all the way.

BTW, I am rendering it down in Vegas 3.0 as an MPEG2 and VBR. I assumed that was the final bitrate but I guess Nero doe sthe final one.

I can do a 50-99 run for between $4.50 - $6.50 each. Price depends on what labels you want to use, B/W or full color, adhesive, inkjet or thermal labels, etc. send message to pikshirtkr(%)charter(spot)net for more info. Smarter to go with a 101 run cuz you can save .50 per DVD over 100. Turnaround is immediate. 262-208-0443

Although the symptoms are the same, I don't think it is the same problem I am having, I just have to ask though. I was watching a movie from the video store (the Rock's movie "Rundown") and at the 13th chapter it froze up. After trying multiple times to restart the movie and go to the same spot, it would freeze up every time. I went to video store and got a different copy of the movie, only to go home and find the same problem. DVD would not go into the 13th chapter either by watching the dvd or by navigating through the chapters. It would pixelize the video at first then just freeze altogether. I switched to a different dvd player and it played perfect. Then after watching the whole movie on the new player, I put it back into original player and it played fine. Weird. The original player was tucked in between the components of a stereo setup in a cabinet, and I was wondering, do you think that after it cooled down a bit that that might have relieved the problem? The DVD player that had problems has never shown errors of any sort, it is 2 years old, higher end DVD player. Can't remember the brand though. Any others have anything like this happen?

"I assume that I can burn one with the next level down and possibly make it all the way."

Have you tried some other players? You should't have to keep dropping the bitrate. That "standard" bitrate should work with most every player. As for those standard/high settings in Nero, how is is implemented? It sounds more like CBR than VBR. If Nero is reencoding your movie to implement it, that too could cause problems.

If you're going to use Nero to do your authoring/burning, perhaps you should let VV3 make you a nice crisp AVI of your movie and feed that to Nero. Then you should be able to make the VBR mpeg encode settings in Nero. I have not played with Nero DVD so I don't know how it works or what it allows you to tweak. At the very least, I suggest you check you somehow check your VBR settings. Maybe the minimum is still too high. Since your player showed at first that it can handle the maximum bitrate for a while, the bitrate reduction in low motion, static scenes on VBR might be just what the picky player needs in order to make it all the way through.

"Then after watching the whole movie on the new player, I put it back into original player and it played fine. Weird. The original player was tucked in between the components of a stereo setup in a cabinet, and I was wondering,"

I have had something like that occur. i made a DVD with a lot of stuff packed on it. It was about 2.5 hours so I set the average BR at about 4.8Mbs. This didn't play at all in my brand new Onkyo. It played fine in 4 other players I had on hand. A couple nights ago I put it in again and it played fine! Maybe the DVD player had had a chance to heat up. I don't want to throw any more fuzzy science into the mix.

John,
I have a test DVD encoded at max bitrate, both audio and video and I cannot say I've seen it not play in anything but I've only seen one DVD player cope correctly. Source material was mostly from HDW 900, high end hardware encoder and pressed media. Not only is the video affected, some players cannot cope with Dolby at the max bitrate either.
I don't have access to the source material to try a lower bitrate but I have no doubt that'd cure the problem. Mostly what I've seen looks like macro blocking, you'd think something was seriously wrong with the encoding yet it's fine on my reference player.

Bob.

I've probably distributed a hundred or so DVD-R's this year, and not one single disc ever came back.

I think that what I do different is that I burn them at 1X. At 1X the laser has a little more time to "burn" the bits on the -r media, giving the set-top players a little more "contrast" to read the data.

It's just a theory, but I have yet to burn a coaster in two years.

Steve