DVD Studio Pro

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Is there anyway to trouble shoot a dvd without physically burning a disc to see if it works or not?
I shot a wedding not long ago and have been having a really hard time making a DL DVD that plays consistently if at all on actual DVD players.
Especially after going through maybe 7 discs before discovering maybe the fact that it worked on the macbook pro doesn't mean it will play back in the Panasonic Blu-ray player I own let alone the Playstation 2 or Sony Combo DVD player.
After some investigation I discovered that my main menu had a duration of 40s and that seemed to make it work but that just seems weird to me I don't get this whole DVD authoring business anymore.

 

[Martin Weiss]

Try burning at the slowest speed and using only high quality DVD discs, for example Taiyo Yuden.

You can also burn a disc image from DSP, and try running off that one from computers. Or try using a DVD-RW disc - but those are less compatible.

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

How can it be an issue of burning speed if the discs work on some players and not others.

 

[Scott Crawley]

Some players have larger buffers than others and can compensate for a larger number of errors.

 

[jimhare]

The short answer is no. DVD-SP only sets the final layer jump on a DL-DVD-R. Plenty of reasons is wouldn't work such as an improper first play command so lots to look at.

Best approach is to stay away from DL if you can. Maybe have a 2-disc "Collector's set" with pre-wedding and ceremony on one, and reception/extras on the other. Put it in a nice 2-disc folder and they will think they are getting extra value while taking away the production pain!

 

[Sid Idris]

playback issues are usually due to a bitrate higher than the player can handle. I used to experience this issue with bluray until I realized I was encoding h264 at a bitrate too high for most consumer players. are you using compressor to create the m2v? Are you maxing the bitrate to minimize compression so as to fill up the DL disc? If so, consider using the standard settings from compressor to create your files.

Cheers

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

I used the 120 min setting in compressor for encoding, an average of 5 Mbps and a Maximum of 7.5 Mbps so it's certainly not the maximum you can run a DVD at, the Audio is running Dolby 2.0 at 192 kbps so essentially I just have a lot of footage on the disc.

I had thought about doing a 2 disc set early on before I started but ultimately I decided it was too much effort to burn disc one and then disc 2 over and over again, it seemed simpler to me to just make a dual layer disc so that people could just watch the content from start to finish which is apparently what most people who have gotten the discs are doing.

How would I identify an improper first play command? At the moment my first play is the main menu.