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Copy Protection?
I’m in the process of cleaning up some fairly old projects. One of these was a VHS recording of a PBS television program that I wanted to preserve for my personal use. The material was recorded off the air by a VHS deck, and converted to digital by passing it through an old SONY video camera. Vegas performed the capture. The program was almost two hours long, so I was trying out the bit calculator to see how to encode it. DVDA Pro 5.0 was showing red, but I prepared and burned a disk anyway. I was quite surprised when the video played a few seconds and stopped the playback. I thought I must have a disk error, but two days of work finally revealed that DVDA was refusing to play (preview) more than 4 seconds of the video. Further, although it placed all the files on a DVD, it inserted the same four second limit. It did all this without any notice to me. To confirm this, I burned the same project with DVDA 3.0. It created a disk that plays normally.
I’m guessing it is copy protection that is causing this although I am amazed that it made it all the way through the processing chain. Does anyone know if this is true, and, if so, why DVDA is not telling me that it doesn’t intend to create a viewable disk.
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4 Replies
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This has nothing to do with copy protection which was removed way before when you captured the files. Something else is wrong here. I’m not sure why DVDA 3.0 worked and 5.0 did not.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I’m at a loss then to explain it. The file used by DVDA played in its entirety with WMP although without sound, but the preview function in DVDA cut off after four seconds just as it did on the burned DVD.
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You were giving DVDA a properly encoded MPEG-2 and AC-3 stream, right?
Try rendering it out as a DV-AVI file and giving that to DVDA and see what happens.
This is an acceptable way of doing it although DVDA will have to re-encode it, adding to your prep time. -
Yes, they were properly encoded, and, as I said, DVDA 3.0 prepared and successfully burned the disk using the exact same file that DVDA Pro 5 refused to play. 3.0 did so without rerendering the files. The burned disk plays successfully on the computer using WMP, and on a TV using a Sony Blu-ray player.
Unfortunately, these files were occupying roughly 26 gigs of hard drive. Once I successfully burned my disks, I deleted the original source files. Further experimentation is not possible. I will have to chalk it up as a possible “feature” in DVDA Pro 5.
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