• DVD Authoring

  Sometimes my DVD plays choppy on computers. Why?

  Posted by Noam Osband on April 20, 2015 at 11:50 pm

  I made a film that I’ve been screening at some colleges. I notice that on some DVD players the film is kind of choppy, that it stops for what must be a fraction of a second…but it does it regularly so that someone walking is walking kind of stilted. This drives me crazy.

  What causes that? Anything I can do about it?

  Thanks in advance!

  Noam Osband replied 11 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Dave Haynie

  April 21, 2015 at 2:32 am

  There are a bunch of possibilities.

  Check your authoring bitrates. It’s fairly unusual for this to be an issue on computers. Older stand-alone DVD players sometimes have issues with bitrates right at the DVD’s peak legal combined audio/video bitrate.

  Watch the DVD-R blanks you’re using, and for universal playback, don’t use DVD-RW or dual layer DVD-R. Lower quality blanks can kead to read errors that trip up your playback. This is particularly true of older stand-alone players, but may be an issue on PCs as well.

  While not a huge problem with modern gear, older PCs doing software-onky decoding can be sensitive to CPU load and the efficiency of the DVD player software. Skip generic players like VLC for DVD-specific player software where possible, and shut down any other applications on the player PC.

  -Dave
• 

  Noam Osband

  April 27, 2015 at 9:29 pm

  So, it works perfectly fine for me on my computer… but I’ve been doing lots of screenings at colleges and often it is choppy on scenes with lots of movement. This is so frustrating. I use Compressor to make the DVD components that I burn with Toast. Any idea what I can do to start narrowing down the problem? Where might I start?

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up