Sticking playback on DVDs

PeterMac wrote on 7/15/2002, 4:51 AM
If anyone has experienced momentary sticking or freezing from a DVD that they have created from their own footage - especially in scenes involving rapid movement changes - I'd be very grateful for details.
The information I'm after is: MPEG encoder used, its settings, make of stand-alone DVD player, make of DVD media and finally whether different playback hardware makes any difference.

-Pete

Comments

vonhosen wrote on 7/15/2002, 1:03 PM
Most of the things you have mentioned can all have their little input on the ability of playback. When your DVD player plays the disc there is a certain amount of error correction going on. The more difficulty the player has the more obvious it will become with the symptoms you have described (freezing etc).
Things you can do....

Use good quality media - It's surprising what an adverse affect cheap media can have on your playback ability. Most reliable media (DVD-R)& cost effective I have used are Apple (Also good are Mitsui,Pioneer & TDK)

Change of bitrate - The maximum bitrate for DVD is 9.8Mbs, now with the error correction going on if you are approaching higher limits (& you say that high action results in freeze & high action in VBR encoded file = high bitrate) then there is a greater chance that if player is having trouble reading file you are going to swamp it's error correction & it will freeze or jump.

You can check out suitability of various media formats with players at www.vcdhelp.com
PeterMac wrote on 7/15/2002, 2:52 PM
Thank you.

Alas, I am all too fully aware of everything that you have kindly taken the trouble to set out.

What I was really looking for was similar experiences for correlation purposes, although I would value your opinion on what happens when you *have* eliminated media and [notional] bitrates.

Are you suggesting, for instance, that an encoder might ignore its parameters if it meets a series of rapidly changing scenes that cannot adequately be dealt with using the set bitrate(s)? It seems to me that, even if this were true (and it shouldn't be!), the bitrates would be capped at a rate within the DVD/MPEG2 standard.
If that were not the case, you would have an encoder that generated output that would indeed skip - at least on hardware sensitive to that sort of thing.

-Pete
vonhosen wrote on 7/15/2002, 3:36 PM
>>Are you suggesting, for instance, that an encoder might ignore its parameters if it meets a series of rapidly changing scenes that cannot adequately be dealt with using the set bitrate(s)? It seems to me that, even if this were true (and it shouldn't be!), the bitrates would be capped at a rate within the DVD/MPEG2 standard.<<

No I wasn't suggesting that. The encoder will pretty much stay within the parameters you set. I was merely saying that if you are experiencing freezing with high motion, that re-encoding with slightly less agressive settings in the encoder may assist error correction within the player and not result in it being swamped & freezing. To be honest the quality of the media is usually the first place to look with this, it's false economy to go with cheap discs.

Having read your original question a 2nd time I can see your slant on perhaps setting a database of problems up.