[Craig Carlen]

Thanks for your reply Mike. By coaster I meant unusable DVD – but I gather you figured that out 🙂

I tried burning to a .iso file and used both MagicISO and Nero 7 to burn the image – neither worked. Windows Explorer can access these disks with some effort (in that I mean a much longer amount of time than normal).

I also tried your suggestion and burned to a folder – PowerDVD would play the entire video, but it would not access (or even recognize) the menu. So the actual video is being rendered/burned correctly, I’m thinking there’s something wrong with the menu but I’m a novice and DVD menu creation and don’t know where to start. When I burned the contents of the folder I had the same problem. If I just burn the .vob files the video plays fine. So there’s got to be something going on with the creation of the menu that’s freezing the DVDs when played.

This is becoming rather frustrating since I do have a somewhat older machine (P4 3.06HT w/2Gig of RAM) so encoding isn’t the fastest. I’ve tried every NTSC CBR encoding option listed in the media encoder both progressive and interlaced and although I do seem to have more success with that – those disks will play at random times – they stop at some point and lock up.