what is it about commercial DVDs?

TeeJay wrote on 11/21/2004, 11:04 PM

What makes commercial DVDs different to a finalised DVD-r ?

I am currently working on an instructional music DVD and plan on getting it duplicated professionally, but am I going to have problems with them not playing on some standalone players?

Regards,

TeeJay

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ScottW wrote on 12/13/2004, 7:57 AM

Whatever you author, you should try it out on as many different players as you can to see that it plays correctly (not talking about the reflectivity issues with DVD-R), that the menus all work, etc. Different authoring packages have different ways of doing things and not all of the ways are entirely compatible with most players (I've authored stuff with DVDA that doesn't play correctly). I seem to remember a recall that Disney Home Video had to do a few years back when they released a DVD that did some fancy things which very few players supported - must have been an expensive mistake.

--Scott

riredale wrote on 12/13/2004, 8:34 AM

I'm coming kind of late to this thread, but can share my experiences with DVD-R. To date I've gone through maybe 500 Ritek G04 blanks and have had only a couple of instances of player incompatibility. One was with a Playstation2, which, as already mentioned, seems to have difficulty with burned media. The other two instances were with DVD players owned by doctors. The connection?--the docs had high disposable incomes, so were using state-of-the-art players--for 1997, that is. Their machines were so old they probably had no concept of a burned DVD.

So, out of many hundreds, three failures, and two were due to old machines.

scdragracing wrote on 12/13/2004, 11:35 AM

what i do to help protect the ownership of the content is to burn my url into everything i do... web, dvd, whatever, make it visible on the monitor as the video is playing... of course there is content that you can't do that with.

traditionally the best blank dvd's and cd's have always come from japan... so it's maxell and taiyo yuden, if you want the best... but the last batch of maxell i got was not packaged correctly from the factory, the discs were too loose inside the cake box, and there was some visible scuffing on the bottom of some of the discs.

out of the hundreds of dvd's that i have sold, there has never been any correlation between legal bitrate and player compatibility... i always use vbr, and the max video bitrate has always been set at 8800 or higher.