[Dvdauthor-users] Playability issues, LPCM the answer?

[Jonathan H. <jha...@nu...>]

Greetings,

I have been having playability issues with authored DVDs. Using Redhat 9
and all my packages are pretty up to date. When I author with AC3 audio
(using ffmpeg) my discs playback fine on an Apex player I have, but they
freeze at each chapter marker on this old Pioneer that I have. If i use
MP2 audio (encoded by toolame) the discs play fine in the Pioneer, but
the Apex plays to a point in the movie and pauses on a chapter marker.
You have to hit play again each time. It will do that a few times before
the show is over. I'm authoring everything as NTSC. Something to note is
when I do everything exactly the same, but I render and author as PAL
instead, the Apex player is fine with MP2 audio. 
 
An old posting on this message list suggested that PCM audio might be
more playable since NTSC standards are PCM/AC3 and PAL standards are
PCM/MP2. I haven't bothered to verify this past the posting on this
list. Since a couple of my discs will be going to friends in PAL
countries, I figured I should try PCM since it's the common thread. Now
I'm having a new problem where one of my DVD players just plays static
hiss for audio on a PCM disc.  I've burned other PCM DVD projects on my
mac that play fine on that machine.

Was wondering if anybody had some suggestions for maximum playability. 

Here's the command I'm using now for audio and multiplexing:

sox "audio1.wav" -V -x -t raw -s -w -c 2 -r 48000 "audio1.lpcm"

mplex -V -v 0 -M -f 8 -L 48000:2:16 -o "movie1.vob" "video.mpg"
"audio1.lpcm" 

I do get a warning everytime during mplex:

++ WARN: [mplex] Discarding incomplete final frame LPCM  stream 0

Thanks,
Jonathan