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how to minimize freezing
I recently finished a video project and authored DVDs of it in DVDSP4. I’m using a G5 tower with an internal Superdrive to burn the disks. They are in SD. My bitrate is set to 4 with a max of 7. I’m running OS10.5.8.
After burning the disks, they played back perfectly on my computer, as well as on a friend’s newish standalone DVD player. Then when we took them to a screening where the players were a little older, they kept freezing. We tried a backup copy of the disk, no help. We replaced the DVD player with a slightly better one and things improved but it still froze occasionally, then would start again a few seconds later, skipping a little. I later tried another copy of the disk on someone else’s older player and it was even worse.
I’m aware that bitrate is a common cause of this, but at 4 and 7 that seems unlikely to me. I used Sony DVD-R disks, in case anyone knows them to be glitchy.
I thought it might have to do with the burn speed. These disks have a default max of 16x, which my burner supports, and I know DVDSP automatically will burn at the highest possible speed. So today I formatted it to my hard-drive, then burned at 4x using Disk Utility, but after the last experience, any amount of testing will still have me nervous about compatibility. I can come back with an update about how this worked out, but in the meantime I’d like to hear any thoughts on how to maximize compatibility (or a link to another thread if this has been explored).
I’m going to be selling copies of these disks and ideally I’d like it if people could play them on whatever DVD player they have. I know that mass market commercial DVDs do not have issues like this when they’re new. Is there something they using in that process that is unavailable to an independent artist?
I miss VHS!
Thanks in advance,
Joe -
6 Replies
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Just a little extra info…
This new disk I burned using Disk Utility, at 4x, I noticed that the bottom of it looks smoother. The 16x disks you can see circles in the burned portion, perhaps where different tracks are encoded? But with this one it’s homogeneous. Good sign?
It plays fine in my CPU, except that it does not autoplay like the other one .. weird. I will have to wait to test it in some DVD players (I don’t have any here at home).
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Joe,
there might be different issues!1. burning-method
have you burned your DVD using DVD SP or have you burned it using mac os finder? finder will not create a proper DVD, as it needs to be formatted unsing the UDF-format. finder will burn the disc using mac os HFS-format, so the disc will not be recognised by DVD-player.
2. compatibility-problem
DVD+/-R media has ofter problems on different players, depending on which player you have, especially on older player that´s a big problem.
3. DVD-media
be awared only to use high-quality-media like verbatim or tajo yuden, other media often have problems with the players
4. PCM audio
98% of all DVDs with playback-issues that I´ve seen has PCM audio on it. if you are using DVD+/-R-media they could only handle max. 8Mbit (total max. bitrate) instead of 10.08Mbit given by spec. so you should use dolby AC3-audio instead of PCM (wav/aif), as PCM have 1.5MBit, that´s a lot more.
you see, there are a lot possibilities why a DVD could fail to play.
cheers
danny
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1. The problematic disks were built and formatted by DVDSP. They were certainly recognized by the DVD players, they just froze sometimes during play. The new disk I burned using Disk Utility. It seemed the only way of having an option to choose a slower speed. Are you saying this disk is not going to work in DVD players even though it works on my computer? If so, how do I successfully burn an appropriate disk at a slower speed?
2. Yeah, it seemed older players gave more problems, but when I’m selling disks I want them to work on anything, like the disks people would get if they bought them at the store.
3. Would you say Sony is not a high quality brand for DVDs? I never heard of Verbatim until researching this topic, and they seem to be everyone’s choice. I’m surprised if Sony makes bad disks – just based on the fact that they make some good video cameras.
4. How do I tell if my video has PCM or AC3 audio? It was made in FCP6, using Export > Quickime movie, then I used some custom settings having to do mostly with aspect ratio. I saw no options for how the sound is encoded other than Rate, Depth, and Configuration, none of which giving a choice between PCM and AC3. I also see nothing on DVDSP about what type of sound is used.
Thanks for the response.
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Joe,
the usual way of authoring is:1. edit your video
2. export it as selfcontained quicktime-mov
3. encode the authoring-assets using compressor or any other encoding-tool that could generate DVD-compliant assets
4. import them into DVD SP and author the discwithin compressor you´ve got several DVD-presets that containing dolby AC3-audio.
be awared that these defaul-AC-3-settings are used with film-source. in that reason they needed to be changed. please search on the correct settings on the cow or the web.
if you just imported your quicktime-mov into DVD SP, then the resulting audio will be PCM.
especially on DVD+/-R media my advice is to use dolby AC3-audio.
cheers
danny
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(Sorry for the delay in responding, I was traveling.)
Yeah, that’s what I did, I put my Quicktime movies straight into DVDSP. I had changed the video settings but didn’t have the option of choosing an audio format, I was unaware that it defaults to PCM. I’ll try your suggestion, and run the files through compressor, specifying Dolby AC3 audio.
Thanks for your help!
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Hi, I just thought I’d follow up on this. A friend of mine has an old DVD player that’s notorious for not playing home-burned disks, so we used that as our test. It turned out that if I burned the disks at 4x rather than 16x, it did the trick. So I did not bother replacing all the files with AAC sound versions.
The main thing to note about this is that DVDSP4 does not give you an option for burning at different speeds, and by default will burn at the max possible speed. So if you instead use DVDSP4 to create a disk image, and then use Disk Utility to burn, you can choose the speed. Apparently, burning them slow makes them more compatible and better behaved.
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