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For the production of dailies the Pioneer PRV-LX1 DVD recorder could be a good solution. Encoding to MPEG-2 and burning the DVD in real time, plus a custom menu.

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I hope this doesn’t stir up one of the (fruitless) “DVD-R vs DVD+R” debates: AFAIK a good quality disc of either format, burned with a good burner, at a reasonable speed, will be compatible with about the same percentage of set top players. If you are using a DVD+R, make sure that your burner supports the bitsetting trick; otherwise some players may refuse a perfectly good disc simply because they don’t recognize the “DVD+R” identification. And if you are submitting a DVD as master for replicated/pressed discs, always use DVD-R.

Pioneer makes good burners. NEC and Plextor are usually good choices too.

My recommendation for labels is: none. 😉 The fact that your test players accept DVDs with and without labels means that they can apparently stomach a high number of read errors. Applying an adhesive label to a good DVD will cause the number of read errors to shoot up. The least damage is done by thin mylar based labels, but even these will lower the quality of your discs.

Printable discs are not that much more expensive than regular ones and inkjet printers that can print on CDs and DVDs are quite affordable too.

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I have seen many posts about Encore, some of them about problems with burning, but I can’t remember ever having seen a post about burning stopping after 7 or 7.5MB. ???

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Unfortunately playback problems with writable DVDs are not uncommon.

I would suggest to try Maxell or Verbatim DVD-Rs. In addition to Michael’s recommendation to use a bit rate no higher than 7Mb/s: If you are using VBR encoding make sure that the maximum setting is 7Mb/s or less. Also let Encore transcode the audio to Dolby Digital (AC3) at 192 or 224Kb/s.

Check if your burner’s firmware is up to date. And never use an adhesive label on a DVD.

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“…a bit too much” is a bit of an understatement…

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A GOP is a Group Of Pictures, a building block of MPEG video. Each GOP starts with an I-frame which contains the entire image, compressed similar to a JPEG still. The I-frame is followed by a number of B- and P-frames which consist mainly of pointers to what has changed in comparison to preceeding and following frames. These frames are responsible for most of the compression in MPEG video. One GOP is max 18 frames NTSC or 15 frames PAL. The usual default size is 15 frames NTSC or 12 frames PAL, which is roughly half a second of video.

As for the “next” key issue: If the end action of the timeline is set to return to the menu and the timeline is also started from a button that did not tell the timeline to change its end action, then you shouldn’t add the chapter marker at the very end to make the DVD do what you want it to do. Instead you should make sure to add every timeline in the correct order to your projects.

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Bryan,

Please check Re: Chapters don’t go in Menu or Button Order.

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This is not related to the problem with the unexpected behavior of the “next” key. (See my other post in this thread.)

The warning means that Encore may have moved the position of trims and/or chapter markers by a tiny amount (half a second or less), so that they fall on the nearest start of a GOP. Which they have to. 🙂

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When you hit the “next chapter” key on the remote, the player will jump to the next chapter marker in a timeline (timeline = VTS on the DVD). If there is no chapter marker in the timeline or if the DVD is already past the last marker, the player will ignore the “end action” setting and jump to the next higher numbered VTS. The VTSs are numbered in the order you added the timelines to your project.

There is a simple solution for what you would like to do: Add a chapter marker almost at the end of each timeline, on the last available start of a GOP (indicated by the white ticks above the timeline). This will be half a second or less away from the end. With this chapter marker in place, when you hit the “next” key, the player will jump to this chapter point, keep playing for a split second and then perform the “end action” you have set for that timeline.

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Enabling DMA in Windows XP

1. Log onto Windows as Administrator (or as a user with Administrator privileges).
2. Click the Start button, then right-click on My Computer and choose Properties from the pop-up menu.
3. Click the Hardware tab, then click Device Manager.
4. Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers to see the list of controllers.
5. Double-click Primary or Secondary IDE Channel (the one your burner is connected to).
6. Click the Advanced Settings tab.
7. Choose DMA if available from the Transfer Mode list.
8. Click OK. You do not need to restart Windows.