CS3 Mac: Button highlights preview and show on computer but not set top player

[John Keane]

I also have the problem that highlights do not appear on a set-top player, but I am using Windows XP not MAC. For some projects it works, for some it doesn’t. There seem to have been reports of this on several forums but I haven’t seen a definite explanation yet.

[Marc Weakley]

Just building my first DVD with Encore on my new intel Mac with my new CS3 suite and…you guessed it…Same problem. I cannot finish my project as I chew up valuable time searching for a resolution.

As this seems to be a fairly significant issue has anyone got a definitive solution for this?

I am also having problems with Premier – but that’s another story. It’s just beginning to feel like Adobe have dropped the ball rejoining the Mac market.

(frustrated) Marc

[John Keane]

Further to my post of 17 May, I am on PC not MAC but, as I said, symptoms are the same. I have done a lot of investigating to eliminate causes. I don’t know the cause but I am convinced it has nothing to do with media or hardware. Once I get a good build I can build to any type or make of DVD -R -RW reliably and using either a Pioneer or a Lite-on drive. On the other hand a ‘bad’ build will reliably give the bad result on any media or drive. I also find the ‘bad’ build will sometimes work on a particular DVD player but not on another, though, as I said, a good one works everywhere. To get a good build I started from one of the sample menus and button types supplied by Adobe. That works. The failure was made from my own .psd menu background and buttons, etc. However, many times I repeat that and manipulate it I can’t get it to work – though, of course, it works in the preview. I’ve read the manual many times. I suspect there is something going on in Encore that shows up unpredictably when a menu and buttons are heavily manipulated. Possibly an interpretation of the DVD specification has something to do with it.
Whatever the cause, Adobe check and preview is not performing its function of detecting the problem, so that’s definitely down to Adobe whatever the root cause. I’m not sure I can take this any further.

[Jeff Bellune]

[John Keane] “I’m not sure I can take this any further”

If you want better reliability for your finished DVDs, you must spend the money to get them replicated.

Burning has always been, and remains even today, a hit-or-miss proposition.

Book type, media, burner, firmware, burn speed, player type, player firmware and encoded bit rates can all have very negative effects on the finished product.

Think that’s bad? Just wait until you try creating home-made (or office-made) Blu-Ray discs. Sony are probably laughing their executive hind-quarters off.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Graham Jones]

Hi Jeff,

I have to disagree, and this is from years of experience… I’ve burned many thousands of DVD’s authored with the nearly free iDVD and with DVD Studio Pro, and while there have been a very (stress “very”) small number of discs not playable on clients’ machines, I get around a 98% or 99% success rate, and the 1 or 2 % are most often because of clients using cheap players.

Compare that to a 0% success rate with Encore… If I pay the large sum of money for Adobe’s authoring program I would like the discs it burns to play on at least ONE player.

And… I am very skeptical that the disc image I create in Encore will not have the issues if I get it replicated. To me there is obviously something that gets missed in the code it creates on the Mac side.

In case you doubt my success numbers, let me explain that with iDVD and DVD Studio Pro I always create a disc image and burn from the disc image rather than from the authoring program, I never burn faster than 4x (slower for replication masters), I always enable verification, I warn clients about using older or low quality players, and I always use the highest quality media.

Using the same safeguards with Encore always produces an unplayable disc.

– Graham.

[Jeff Bellune]

[Graham Jones] “In case you doubt my success numbers”

I have absolutely no reason to doubt the veracity of your statements. 🙂 To do that would be to essentially call you a liar, and that would be very poor form indeed. 😉

Thanks for providing in-depth info on your workflow and results.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Graham Jones]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your comments; no problem.

– Graham.

[Joe Bowden]

Graham, I’ve never had any problems like you’ve described with a DVD burned from Encore. My success rate has been 100%.

[Graham Jones]

Hi Joe,

That’s good news… sort of. Can we trade system specs and see what’s different about your system? Obviously lots of Mac users are having the same symptoms as me, and we need to isolate what’s causing this.

I have tried on:

– Mac Pro (Intel) 2xDual Core 2.66 GHz 8 GB Kingston RAM, Mac OS 10.5.1, QT 7.3.1, Adobe CS3 (no updates at the time– this was about 2months ago), Sony & Pioneer internal burners.

– Macbook (Intel) Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz 2 GB Kingston RAM, Mac OS 10.5.1, QT 7.3.1, Adobe CS3 (no updates at the time– this was about 2months ago), Matsushita internal burner.

– Dual G5/2.5 GHz 4.5 GB Kingston RAM, Mac OS 10.4.11, QT 7.3.1, Adobe CS3 (no updates at the time– this was about 2months ago), Sony internal burner & external LaCie. Decklink SP card also installed, I think with 6.0 drivers at the time.

Media tried was Verbatim 16x, Maxell 8x, Fuji 16x, but always burned at 4X speed.

Thanks,
Graham.

[John Keane]

I have to agree with Graham and disagree with Jeff. Putting problems down to a vague list of possible causes is not getting to the bottom of anything. (It’s probably the sort of ‘explanation’ that Adobe like to hear.) The point I thought I had made was that a ‘bad’ encore build is bad whatever you do to write the DVD. A good one, for me anyway, works every time that I have re-built and written it on various media and drives. SOMETHING is going wrong BEFORE the DVD write, i.e. its in Encore which is why I can’t take it any further. (I also have no such problems with other software such as DVDit using the same media and hardware.)
As a software developer for 25 years I can imagine the kind of thing that is probably going wrong but it’s not practical for me to follow it up without access to Encore source code etc. The deafening silence from Adobe in the face of these reports on various forums is disappointing.