DVD's wont play on all players

[Mark Monciardini]

Ok, here we go again. This can be a nightmare when clients call you back telling you the DVD wont play on their players.

It looks like regardless if it's iDVD or DVD Studio Pro, the same thing happends.

Is there anyway to solve this once and for all?

Can you guys tell me what's working better for you "DVD-" or "DVD+" ?

Recently I've used DVD- (CompUSA brand) and it failed on one Home player that was 2 years old, failed on a new Labtop and worked on a faily new HP Labtop.

[Jeff Donald]

I use -R's and rarely have problems any more. I suggest burning a disk and taking it to a Best Buy, or similar discounter, and trying the disk in many of their DVD players. Report back your results and we can go from there.

Most computers use software players and generally do not have as good a compatibility as hardware players.

[Jake Russell]

The only way to guarantee 100% compatibility is sending a DLT to a replication house and have them press your disc. Even then though there are other steps to be taken which can help improve compatibility and make it more dvd player friendly. You next safest bet is to use 3.95GB authoring media but then you need an authoring drive which doesn't come cheap.

If you use Compressor to encode then your disc wont play on all players. It's a bug which hasn't been solved and we can't find the cause of. If you use toast to write the disc from a build to a HD you will run into compatibility problems due to a region info conflic. The region info in the lead-in and VMG(Video ManaGer) has to be the same. When dvdsp writes the VIDEO_TS folder to the HD it ignors what you check in the Regions tab and always flags regions 1-6 and leaves 7 & 8 disabled. So when you write a disc with Toast the lead-in is saying region all(1-8) and the VMG is 1-6, not allowed by the spec and confuses some players.

There are many reasons that a -r or +r wont play and thats just the way it is unfortunatly. The vast majority of the time using another brand will solve the issue or use AC-3 audio instead of PCM. If you expect a 20-30% failiure rate you wont be shocked.

Go here and scroll down to July 2002 for the DV Compatibility test.

http://www.dv.com/features/archive.jhtml

Jake

[Jeff Donald]

There are newer compatibility lists that have been posted recently. Search DVD compatibility and you should find some threads. If the DVD player is more than 3 years old I would expect some incompatibility issues.

[Jake Russell]

Yep there are newer ones for sure but I didn't post it for the results. If you read the text there is some info that may help as it explains some of the reasons recordable media can cause problems.

Hope you get it solved.

Scroll down here for more info on the region issue:

http://www.lafcpug.org/review_tfdvdedit.html

Jake

[Rick Foxx]

One thing you can check in DVD SP is the maximum bit rate of your video. As a general rule, don't set the maximum bit rate higher than 7.0. Even though the DVD spec is higher, many players have trouble with the higher data rate.

I have only had one disk come back in two years of burning my own DVDs, and it failed on my players as well. IMHO, DVD-R is the safest bet.

Rick

[Jeff Donald]

Good advice on the bit rate and I have always had trouble with PCM audio, use AC-3.

[Mark Monciardini]

This is good stuff! I'll definitly take these tips into consideration when burning the next one.

Looks like idvd doesn't have any coding options?

May have to stick with DVD Studio!

Thanks!

[Gints Klimanis]

I've never had trouble with PCM audio playback on DVD players. It's part of the DVD spec, along with AC3. Many DVD authoring systems don't offer AC3 encoding as an option. Some DVD authoring packages (Pinnacle Studio8, for one) offer MPEG audio (actually MPEG1 Layer II) encoding for space savings. While
it's not part of the DVD spec, most DVD players can handle it along as it's not too high. Apparently, earlier Sony PS2 are quite picky about the MPEG audio bitrate.

[Jeff Donald]

Gints, these are particular observations about the audio used and burning the disk with various Mac compatable programs.

[Ted Springer]

I agree with most of what has been said here (use AC3, keep the bitrate low, etc). I have found that stability is helped when burning the DVD at 1x with Toast. I have no idea why this is. But I have burned discs that skip all over the place with DVD Studio pro (2x with my drive) and burning the same material with the same drive on the same media at 1x with Toast yielded better, unskippable results.

I'd also stray away from the cheap CompUSA DVD-R media.TDK has never ever let me down. But I hear that Maxells are even better. They are so good that they don't seem to sell them anywhere!

PlayStation 2 cannot play DVD-R. Well the newer versions can. Actually I take that back. Mine tried to play a DVD-R that was on the original Apple media, but it couldn't do it in real time. Skipped and stuttered like crazy. The PS2 is a crappy DVD player anyway.

[Jeff Donald]

Agreed, Maxell has provided me the best results with Pioneer burners and DVD SP and Toast. Definitely avoid off brand and house brand (CompUSA) for maximum compatibility..

[Jake Russell]

Yep everything is pretty much covered in the link I gave.

The reason to write at 1x, especially if going to replication is cause the faster you write the more errors there are, basically. +R, has it's own sector corrector built in so can correct a lot as it writes to disc.

As far as PCM audio goes, yep it's fine to use but takes up a lot more bandwidth so it normally solves a lot of problems. If you have a high max bitrate or your encoder spikes now and again even if you dont want it to you will usually have a lot more problems is you have PCM audio cause it takes up so much bandwidth. MPEG1 Layer II is not for NTSC dvd-video.

Jake

[Dave Cook]

<<<-- Originally posted by Rick Foxx : One thing you can check in DVD SP is the maximum bit rate of your video. As a general rule, don't set the maximum bit rate higher than 7.0. -->>>

I recently created a DVD at 8.0 Mbps and although it works fine on newer DVD players, I've found that older units have trouble. Does quality suffer visibly between 8.0 and 7.0 Mbps?

[Jeff Donald]

No, not in my experience.