WinDVD playability problem

[Grand Admiral]

I personally hate PC based players, why? because every store bought and dvd I have authored looked like crap on a PC monitor but looked great on a 20+ inch tv screen. I would ask him to play it on a standard home unit, or in what you would find in a sound card trouble shooting guide…”Make sure his speakers or headset is connected to the correct port or if your speakers are powered, make sure they are on..”

[Dave Friend]

[bakerzman] “Is there a known playability issue with Intervideo WinDVD? “

Encore projects I’ve created play just fine with WinDVD 5 on my system.

Your client’s inability to play the DVD could be due to so many different factors it’s hard to know where to start listing them. Getting audio without video does tend to indicate that his system can’t process the data from the DVD fast enough. What bitrate was used for your disc?

Dave

[Cody Baker]

Thanks for your feedback.

I encoded at 8mb VBR 2 pass.

[Roadkill]

The bit rate is rather high and as it is VBR it will go even higher than 8Mb/s. Is your client perhaps using a laptop computer to play the DVD?

[Mike Cohen]

I have found that desktops and laptops routinely have a problem using Windows Media player, despite having a 3rd party player installed, such as PowerDVD which always works great.

I now print on my packaging “Compatible with newer DVD players and Computers equipped with DVD-ROM drive and compatible third party playback software.”

Mike

[Mike Smith]

I can report from direct personal experience successful playback of a range of Encore-authored dvd discs using Intervideo’s WinDVD – even discs with high data rates, playing on an ageing and slowish computer runnning WinME. So I don’t think there’s an underlying compatibility issue.

I guess you’ve likely lost that client already, though.

No doubt you’ve tested your disc on a standalone player or two, and had other users view it on computer without difficulty ..?

If you were trying to troubleshoot the client’s computer, I guess you’d want to test (a range of) discs on it, commercial and DVD-R using different disc speeds (x4, x8, x16?) as well as video compressed at different data rates .. if everything (anything) else plays, there would be more reason to suspect a problem with your disc …