Serious Bug found in the page navigation

Mxlinus wrote on 3/11/2004, 11:09 AM

I made a DVD for customer purposes, it was pressed in Sonopress Germany, so I'm not talking about a bug that occurs with burned DVD's.

This bug is pretty serious and it just might have cost me a lot of money.
The only good thing is that it MIGHT occur in just a few DVD players, and XBOX (with XBOX i can live with but not regular players). The dvd player that my customer found this bug was Panasonic dvd-rv32. There might be more players out there, but this was the only one that I've been informed because I just send the first copies to the customers yesterday straight from press.

Description:
In the dvd there is 3 submenu's that have a number of subpages (those which you can navigate by arrows). When you enter the first page, the dvd player automaticly flashes through all the pages in a second or less and returns in the main menu (xbox does the same +shows the xbox -logo and when you press select key on the remote it returns to the main menu).

So this means that you can't view the subpages at all !

I looked into the project to see the preferences of the pages.
In every subpage, I had a background image, no video and no sound.
I had auto-calculate on. The looped switch was OFF because it can't be ON when you just have a picture in the "background video/image" because the loop would not be over 5 seconds long (you will notice this error when you try to prepare the DVD).

This means I didn't do anything wrong either!

After you select one of the submenus that have subpages, i quicly pressed pause and were able to view page 5 or 6 of the 12 pages a had created.

I can just hope that this bug don't appear on too many DVD-players, because if it does, I'm going to be a poor man after my customers file the complaints!!

Comments

farss wrote on 3/11/2004, 12:42 PM

There is a know bug that only affects PAL DVDs, symptom is the menu items fail to highlight. Only seemed to occur on some players.
I'm wondering if you're seeing a different manifestation of this bug.

Sony had a patch that did fix it but as far as I know they never did a general release of it which is very odd. I did get hold of and it did fix the problem but I've heard nothing about it since.

I'd strongly suggest you get an email off to customer service. If this is what's causing your problem and they've failed to make the fix easily available and also failed to make its existance well known then I think you're justified in being pretty angry about this.

I raised my concerns over how this was being handled some time ago, they have the email address of every registered user, I've still not received notification about this bug.

Still a damn fine program, being let down by sloppy support.

Mxlinus wrote on 3/11/2004, 1:33 PM

hi farss.

I am working with PAL and I was aware of the highlight bug and the patch was applied to the project, so that patch didn't fix my current problem!

The highlight bug was quite a BIG bug, but this seems to be even bigger.

I've been very satisfied to Vegas for a long time but I'm sad to say, I'm very dissapointed to DVD Architech right now, and this will question my realibility to Sonic Foundry.

How can they let these kind of bugs end up to the software!

farss wrote on 3/11/2004, 7:00 PM

I guess before we all get too excited you need to consider the possibility that it's a bug in the player, it wouldn't be the first time that's been found.
Certainly let tech support know and see how it goes on the other players at the same time.

Mxlinus wrote on 3/12/2004, 9:17 AM

Now I found another DVD player that shows the same bug.
It's a new LG DVD4750. This is starting to get really serious!!

I'm going to be in deep **** pretty soon when my customers start to complain even more!

farss wrote on 3/12/2004, 12:35 PM

Its sounding less like a player bug and more like a DVDA bug.
Have you emailed tech support directly, also I'd try a DVD burnt straight from DVDA in these players if at all possible, just to eliminate the possibility that the replication house screwed it up (very unlikely I know).
I'm also in PAL land and have about 8 titles currenlty being duplicated (not replicated but if demand grows that'll change) and this doesn't fill me confidence.

Udi wrote on 3/13/2004, 10:37 PM

I found that some player don't like the default page behaviour of not looping.
and they will either stop when the time expire or will return to the previous menu.

All the player I tested worked fine with the loop on and setting the time to 30sec or more.
You can specify the length for pages, even when you don;t have movie or audio.

The downside, if the user select an item, and didn't press the play button, the selection will revert to the default selection after the loop. Also, some player has a noticable "gap" when restarting the loop.

Udi

Mxlinus wrote on 3/14/2004, 9:33 AM

I'm aware that you can set the time eventhough you don't have audio or video on the page, but when preparing the dvd, it makes the picture a 30 secong mpg video, so it takes a lot of space from the DVD.
That I can't afford to do, because I have to be able to fit 120 minutes of video on the DVD, so I have to save every byte I can, and that 30 seconds of a picture, takes too much space...

ALSO, there's no point that you have to make a somekind of a trick, to make the software work on all DVD players!

And the fact is, that the DVD I made, already came from press (500 copies of it), so I can't resolve anymore... hope for your sake, tech team will very soon, or they're going to have a lot of unsatisfied customers.

Spinal wrote on 12/8/2004, 3:40 AM

Mxlinus: I've also encountered this problem today with my XBox (I'll check the DVD on other devices later this day). My XBox is version 1.5, PAL and has a Samsung DVD player. What is the version number of your XBox?
The funny thing is that this error only occured after I made a lot of menu pages (nearly 300). When I only had ~100 pages, even XBox played it fine.
So the bug is not because the number of menu pages (including submenus)?
What should I do? Print a notice on the DVD's cover for the customers that 'this product was made by DVDA2, so if you have a player that this program doesn't like, you will not be able to control the menu'?
There must be a better solution than this.

Update: I forgot that I made a DVD from an earlier version of my project (less menu pages, only one avi video), prepared it for burning and made a DVD from it with Nero. It works fine on the XBox! So it IS a bug in DVDA2 and NOT IN the XBox.
What should I do?

Spinal wrote on 12/8/2004, 3:37 PM

I've fixed the problem. It was not because the desktop player, nor the Xbox. In my case setting the audio for the menu pages (Optimize DVD) from AC3 5.1 to AC3 stereo solved the problem - even if the menus hasn't got audio tracks.

joeldecker wrote on 12/9/2004, 2:47 PM

I think I'm experiencing this bug in DVDA Studio as well. (Using NTSC.)

At first I thought it was just that selecting the first page of the menu caused the XBox to "stop" (show the XBox logo). But the menu on that DVD only had two sub-pages, so I think it was just flashing through them so fast that I didn't notice.

When I later tried a DVD on which I had a menu with 6 sub-pages I actually saw it flash through the sub-pages and then show the XBox logo.

I'll be interested to hear any solution you find to this.