strange DVD burning problems

[Bill Ball]

I have mastered several DV projects in the past to DVD-R with few problems (worked in 95% of the players people tried). Now I have a new project and it is giving me all sorts of problems. I'm about out of ideas as to what is going on.

The original is DV, 16:9, interlaced, NTSC. It was edited on Premiere Pro (1.5) and the DVD encoding and writing was done in Encore. Recorded on an older Sony DVD writer as 8mb CBR. Run time is 11 minutes. No menus, just the movie as the first play option. This is the same set up as previous projects that worked well.

But now the new one only plays in about 1/3rd of the players. I thought my drive was getting out of spec so I bought a new Lite-on. Same problem. Maybe it was the batch of disks. Change brand. Same problem. Change to DVD+Rs. Same problem. Update all drivers, turn off all other software. Same problem. etc, etc.

So I have tried altering every variable I could think of. At this point I am searching for ideas of what to try next. I am also wondering if there is something different about the source file (the DV master) that I am missing. It is normal 16:9, interlaced, NTSC DV but aside from that, is there anything that could be in a source DV file that could cause playing problems after it has been encoded and burnt to DVD? I am pretty sure the problem is not in the encoding & writing process.

Ideas?

[Aanarav Sareen]

What brand of disc are you using? That may explain the reason why its causing these playback problems. Visit my site: http://www.asvideoproductions.com/video and take a look at the DVD Info article.