Something interesting happened burning a DVD

BillyBoy wrote on 11/10/2003, 2:37 PM
This is my first truly "weird" DVD burning problem. As I've said in another thread I have got a couple bad burns, but solely due to bad media. That was confirmed by a message saying as much on screen. during the burning process. In short it said such and such track couldn't be wrote to.

THIS IS DIFFERENT and a little strange. Long post, but interesting.

Project was 3 videos of various sizes rendered to MPEG-2 in Vegas then allowing DVD-A to recompress the audio. According to Optmize the project size was reported as 4.659.8 GB, close to capacity yes, yet DVD-A only shows 97% useage with setting the reported media capacity to 4.7. Lets not quibble over that math variance.

I've made DVD's close to the size limit before, so I said what the heck, go for it. DVD-A proceeded to do its thing and about 24 minutes later the disc pops out. Everything seems fine. No error messages. The first thing odd was there wasn't any confirmation box saying that the burn completed successfully. That's something you always see after a successful burn. Not this time.

I put the burned disc into my trusty Pioneer 333 and instead of seeing MENU which I normally do after a few seconds I just see LOADING and hear the player trying to get started. After a solid minute, no dice.

Next I put the same disc in my PC, bring up Media Player and in a few seconds I see the menu, then a couple seconds later I get the dreaded "Windows Media Player has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience" message.

Undaunted, I bring up Power DVD, the disc loads immediately and the disc plays fine all the way through. No skips, no hangs, nothing wrong.
I try a few other players. One had some minor troubles. The others play the disc fine.

I'm writing this more for illustrative purposes rather than asking what the heck do I do now. On the surface it would seem the disc was either "bad" meaning the disc itself. Perhaps something happened during the burning. Remember as I said in the beginning this time DVD-A didn't offer the usual 'it burned OK' message. But if either was true then how come the majority of PC DVD players I tired it on play the disc properly? Then how is it that Microsoft's Media Player could get as far as loading the menu page, then crash and burn immediately after?

What did I do? I went back into the project, optimize, changed the default 8 MPBS down to where it showed the project file size to be 4644.8 from the original 4659.8, by dropping the shown bitrate to 6380. Again the math seems squirlly, but lets again skip that.

This time instead of using another inkjet printable DVD +R disc like I wanted to, I tired a DVD +RW. In burned fine. DVD-A reported that it burned fine as it should. And to no surpirse it plays fine now in my DVD set top, and in every PC DVD player I tried it in.



Comments

farss wrote on 11/10/2003, 3:21 PM
I've had a lot of trouble with DVDA when you get very close to max capacity and then add a few scene selection menus. At times it tries to insert another copy of the video and goes from 98% to 140%. Take the menu out and its fine, but optimize still shows the extra video as being there.

I doubt this is the same as your problem but there sure is the odd thing going wrong in DVDA. Maybe in this case something like the IFO file wasn't written correctly, without a lot of detailed analysis you'll probably never know, maybe the lead out wasn't written correctly, just guessing really.
BillyBoy wrote on 11/10/2003, 3:42 PM
This is just totally off the wall, just wondering if anyone knew...

When you write a "data" disc for drag and drop for example as a first step you need to format the disc. It may be on the fly as the disc is burned but its still getting formatted AFAIK.

What I was wondering is when you "burn" a DVD in some application like DVD-A I'm assuming the blank discs out of the shrink wrap are originally raw, meaning no formatting of any kind. Right?

If so, and DVD-A caculates your project to be X size and the caculation is really X plus some tiny fraction and you're close to pushing the limit what happens? Will it be like driving off the cliff, with DVD-A being totally oblivious that it no longer has any more space on the disc to write data to, you would think it would flag it and pop some error message, but does it?
bstep1 wrote on 11/11/2003, 3:27 PM
Strange coincidence, but I had almost the exact same experience this morning. I have burned 100's of DVDs and never had a problem, but when I tried to burn one this morning that was 4.5 GB, I got that different message and the DVD will only play 1 of 5 titles. I'm guessing it is a capacity issue and the links/navigation file did not complete correctly. I'm going to reduce the size a little and see if that helps. You said you dialed yours down to 4644 from 4659 - how did you pick that adjustment?
BillyBoy wrote on 11/11/2003, 4:36 PM
Yep...

I used a very scientific method... I just pushed the slider a little left and hoped for the best. It worked. <wink>

Good luck.

Let us know if that fixed yours too.
Spielberg wrote on 11/12/2003, 3:19 AM
I did not read this thread before I posted my own "Error #89020003 when playing DVD on PC", but I experience almost that same problem.
However, in my case Power DVD is the player that does not work at all. I get to the menu but then i stops. And as I said, I have tried some other players as well, but no one works really good.

However, in by Denon DVD1500 it works fine, even though the disk keeps loading and loading and no menu is visable until I press play or menu button.

I use DVD-R and the project is even below 4 GB.

//S
bstep1 wrote on 11/12/2003, 7:33 AM
Scaled back to around 4.3GB and it worked perfectly. I wonder what the true max is? When I get a little time, I'll test and post. Thanks for the help.