[Christopher Smith]

Your frustration is industry-wide, and no one wants to solve the problem with an affordable tool.

Telestream makes an expensive tool (Switch) which allows you to view MXF files, and even drop in subtitle tracks to verify they line up with audio and video. Switch also displays any of the 608 or 708 caption tracks, and provides info on all the tracks in the MXF file.
https://www.telestream.net/switch/overview.htm

telestream.net

Multiformat video player, inspection and conversion tool | Telestream Switch

Switch multiformat video player allows you to play a variety of web and professional media formats, inspect and adjust the properties of the file and export a new file. Download and try for free.

[Christopher Smith]

Blu-rays like you see in stores are created ‘manually.’ Unfortunately there is no software (and never was) which provides easy programming of BDs as there was for DVDs with Spruce/DVD Studio Pro. Creating a ‘real’ Blu-ray involves Java programming, and the process is the DVD authoring equivalent of programming a computer in assembly language.

If you don’t need all the bells and whistles (those cool pop-over graphics, menus, etc.), you can burn a single high-resolution feature to Blu-rays as others have described here, using Toast or similar.

[Christopher Smith]

Sadly, fully-functional DVD software (meaning that you can create menus, scripts, subtitle tracks, audio tracks, and other programming) has not been sold in many years.

My setup has macOS 10.12 Sierra running a virtual machine of 10.6 Snow Leopard Server, the last version of macOS which could run DVD Studio Pro without missing parts of the interface. I have DVD AfterEdit on that virtual machine as well, for the times when I need to manipulate a dual-layer DVD, or produce a DLT image for replication.

Setting up a computer for DVD creation today is impossible, unless you have access to old hardware and old operating systems, as well as the antique software DVD-ROMs. DVDs can still be created (in Roxio Toast), but you won’t be able to include the scripting to tie menus to video assets, nor will you be able to use menus to change audio and subtitle tracks. Changing audio and subtitle tracks can still be performed by the viewer using their remote control, but I’m not sure how you would add multiple tracks (either type) to assets using Toast.

[Christopher Smith]

[Kalleheikki Kannisto] “Just wondered if anyone else had run into the same issue recently.”

Yes, indeed. We’re having many problems with Premiere and AME, especially in the past month, even though nothing changed in the software we have installed in our suites. We’re not even running High Sierra yet, but in the past month, Animation codecs have stopped working, and other glitches have appeared.
It is particularly frustrating and puzzling as no software has been updated. Videos in animation codec which I try to transcode to M2V for DVD production are stopping in the AME queue after encoding (the task doesn’t ever finish on its own and move to the next task), although the video does encode. IOW animation codec videos transcode, get stuck at the very end of processing, and I must stop the queue (check “No, please don’t finish.”) and restart the queue to transcode the next video.
So, without changing our (editors) software, somehow Adobe has broken Animation codec. My only guess is that the Graphics department made a change to their software, so their Animation codec videos are now defective.
Note that Animation codec is not on Adobe’s list of deprecated codecs.

Christopher Smith

CBN International

[Christopher Smith]

FCP 7 means DVD Studio Pro, and DVD Studio Pro is the last remaining DVD authoring software available (as it has been the only player in the field for many years now). If High Sierra kills DVDSP, it kills DVD production. So, yes, when you make your living authoring DVDs, you must keep FCP 7 alive and kicking!

Christopher Smith

CBN International

[Christopher Smith]

Rick, I haven’t experienced quite that problem, at least none that made the video pause and play irregularly. The only issue I’ve had with sync loss—and that was smoothly progressive increase in lag—was due to issues with drop frame vs non-drop frame confusion in encoding.

Christopher Smith

CBN International

[Christopher Smith]

Great minds think alike!
It’s quite surprising that no one has done anything in this field, especially as we’ve had the Internet available to the public for more than 25 years now. I remember many years ago there was a DVD authoring program that could make a mini website as an alternate output, but I think that was Encore, so naturally Adobe added it to the dustbin of especially useful software which has been killed over the years (Fireworks, ThinkTank, HyperCard, …).

You would just have to create a website without easy tools, I guess.

Christopher Smith

CBN International

[Christopher Smith]

Hi Steven

When you don’t want subtitles to appear, you can choose a subtitle stream [one which will exist on the disc; see next paragraph] and uncheck the View box.

But if you want to be sure the DVD player won’t show subtitles against your wishes, create an “empty” subtitle track to point your disc programming to. Right-click in an empty subtitle track and select Add Subtitle, or Add Subtitle at Playhead. You now have one blank subtitle in that track, and that stream becomes your “empty” subtitle selection. If you don’t put a blank subtitle in the stream, that subtitle stream is not muxed on Build. (Otherwise, we’d always have 32 choices of subtitles—most of them blank—on all DVDs produced by DVDSP!)

It’s also a good idea to make the “empty” subtitle stream S1, as DVD players have been known to default to ST Stream 1 when in doubt. And if that stream is blank, then you don’t see subtitles. I’ve never had problems on my discs when I put actual subtitles in S1 (and blank in S3), but others have told me it’s better practice to make the empty stream S1 instead of S2 or 3.

Christopher Smith

CBN International

[Christopher Smith]

HI Nick
Fortunately, I don’t have to do many Blu-ray discs, however I can provide some input.

A video encoded for Blu-ray is not only (able to be) encoded at a higher bit rate, but a different compression algorithm is used. So instead of 9 Mbps of MPEG-2, you’re getting 9+ Mbps of H.264. You’ll have higher picture quality at the same bit rate, simply from using the better compression standard.

That being said, you don’t have a lot of pixels to begin with, so you really won’t get any improvement for SD video at rates above 9 Mbps MPEG-2, even if you could put higher bit rates on a standard DVD.

I guess this pertains to both questions 1 & 2.

Christopher Smith

CBN International

[Christopher Smith]

Hi Rick

I’ve never seen that error message, so I have to guess what might be wrong. I would guess the software you’re using to produce the SCC file messed up somehow. I use Annotation Edit from Zeitanker.com, and if this happened to me, I would try a new export. Then I would try exporting the captions track that Annotation Edit produces when the Caption Test is run successfully; it always makes a new copy of the Captions track if there are no overflow errors, and the timecodes on that will be a few frames different, to optimize playback. Often, that Caption Test track works better than the human-produced one.
Finally, I would try re-importing the problem SCC file into Annotation Edit, and then export a fresh SCC from that.

Whenever I receive caption errors from DVDSP, it is on Build, not import of the SCC file, so I’m at a loss what could be the issue you’re experiencing.

Christopher Smith

CBN International