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Problems with replicated/pressed DVDs not playing properly
Hi
I often do the authouring for a CD/DVD duplication company. They have been given two DLTs which they sent away to be replicated. When the DVD 9s returned and where sent out by their client, some where being returned because they where not playing correctly.
These problems included
Not playing the FBI warning at the head
and not showing the correct menu. The main menu had two links on it, and the second link would not work properly and not connect to what it was supposed to.
My business coleagues watched the disc and where unable to replicate the problem. The client brought in their DVD player and showed them what happens, yet the same disc, when place in another player worked fine.
I thought that pressed or replicated DVDs removed this compatibilty issue?
I have been given one of the discs to see if i can find out what may be the problem. I have DVD info pro, and it shows that the disc was authored in DVD producer and is open region. I can see that the disc is an NTSC formated disc, playing in PAL country players (australia). is there anything i can check…..
does anybody have any ideas as to why some set tops will play the entire disc, yet others will not. The client is my colleagues biggest and we dont want to lose them
Cheers
Chris -
10 Replies
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Not ALL PAL DVD Players will play NTSC DVD’s properly. Do you have any Retail NTSC DVD’s to try in the PAL DVD Player that doesn’t work — it could just be the “standards” conversion is not available for those clients who are having problems…
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Do you know or can you find out what the make and model of your client’s client’s player is?
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Chris,
Two other possible problem areas besides replication occur to me. First, it may be an authoring issue. Second it could be the client’s player.
On the authoring side it’s not improbable that an error was made in program flow control logic. I do not know if DVD Producer allows access to PGC/cell pre and post commands and/or GPRMs the way some Sonic products do. If it does, it’s not hard to create bugs that mess up the program flow. (Done it many times myself.) Short of talking with the people who actually did the authoring there aren’t a lot of options for troubleshooting this.
One thing you can look for using a set-top player is if things go wrong after the resume play function has been used. If you run into problems after using this feature then buggy authoring is highly likely.
A couple of software tools that allow you to examine the structure of a DVD, including navigational commands, are ifoedit (https://www.ifoedit.com/) and PgcEdit (https://home.tiscali.be/debie.roland/pgcedit/). These programs are really designed to create DVD copies, ostensibly to create a ‘backup’. PgcEdit is particularly adept at spotting illegal or invalid commands. These require quite a lot of understanding about the technical details of a DVD’s structure to be of value for your needs. But the price is right (free) and perhaps you will learn new things. (I don
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Incorrect navigation in the DVD player usually indicates tha the authoring might be buggy. On a replicated DVD, bad manufacturing usually shows up as MPEG errors in the picture plus garbage in the sound track. This happens because the data becomes corrupted in the portion of the disc that is n.g.
Certain brands & models of settop DVD players are known to execute particular programming instructions incorrectly. Also, many PC and Mac software DVD players have problems in this regard.
This illustrates the need for compatibility testing before replication. Did you or anyone else test the check discs before the replication run was authorized?
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One other thing that we found that caused menus to hang was mixing of DF and NDF footage. We had routinely edited in DF, but our menus on our first try came out of After Effects in NDF and it created menus that hung on some DVD players. Luckily we caught this in testing before replication.
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[kenh] “One other thing that we found that caused menus to hang was mixing of DF and NDF footage.”
DF and NDF, as in drop frame and non-drop frame? There is no difference in the footage between these two. DF and NDF only refer to how timecode is handled.
What exactly did you change in regards to DF vs NDF?
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I’m leaning towards the DVD Player — since he is trying to play an NTSC Formatted disc in a PAL DVD Player (many of the PAL DVD Players do it, but that doesn’t mean they all do, or whether they do a good job).
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The footage was captured as Drop Frame and the Menus were authored as non drop frame. Bill Stephan would know better, but I think it’s no no to mix these in a project. You can use either DF or NDF footage, but not mix the two in a project I think. Anyway, when we changed everything in the NLE to NDF, the DVD worked perfectly. So now we only use NDF video to encode, though you could use all DF as well. I don’t know that this is your problem, but it did create a similar problem with the DVD stuttering on the opening menu and problems accessing the menu buttons.
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kehn,
Thanks for the reply. So I can possibly avoid this problem which NLE are you talking about?
Dave
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It isn’t a function of the NLE. It’s a function of us being brain dead and taking the program sequences from the NLE in DF and the menus out of After Effects in NDF and then combining them in the DVD project. Anyway, the NLE we did this in is Speed Razor which is easy to avoid since they’ve gone belly up. We also have FCP on a Mac, but this project was an ongoing one that we have on a PC.
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