[QDVDAuthor-users] DVD playablility on different machines

[Scott P. <sco...@op...>]

Hi,


I have authored a number of DVD disks now using qdvdauthor and have had 
various degrees of success getting them to play back on DVD players. In 
our house we have 4 DVD players.

The machine in our family room, a "Nutec NDV2020" will play almost 
anything - in fact you can just dump mpeg video of any kind onto a disk 
and it will allow you to play back the files.

The machine in my bedroom, a "Tevion T390" will play just about 
everything I author providing I have a menu structured correctly. It has 
rejected a few disks for different reasons (some of the mpeg encoders 
produce output which some machines choke on occasionally) but I was able 
to reauthor and/or re-encode the video and work around this.

The 3rd machine, a "Magnavox MDVD50", which belongs to our eldest son 
plays most things but has had trouble with some of the menus. I suspect 
the video will generally play back although we had a disk the other day 
which skipped and had weird pixelation effects (picture broke up 
perhaps) a few times during the movie.

The 4th machine, a "Dick Smith Electronics DSE G1607", which belongs to 
our youngest son is a very difficult unit and while it seems to play 
back most video, it has trouble with the menus to the point where you 
cannot even begin playback of the movie. I am talking about a simple 
menu with a static image, one button which plays mpeg DVD video track. 
Sometimes I put a sound track behind the static menu if the movie has a 
distinctive theme song or similar. This last unit is a cheap "Dick 
Smith" DVD player. I am not sure what the issues with the menus are but 
I did take some measures which seemed to take from 0% success on the 
last machine to perhaps 50% success. One example was to make the menu 
track several minutes long both with the static image and the empty 
sounds track. It seems to choke on all sounds tracks (encoded as mp2) 
and will the audio will break up and/or skip while the menu is viewed. 
This does not seem to have any effect on whether or not it will allow 
you to press the button on the remote and begin playback.

I also tried 2 movies on my sister-in-laws DVD player last week. This 
unit is a JVC machine perhaps 2 or 3 years old. This was the weirdest of 
all. When the static menu with no sounds track was displayed after I put 
the disk in, and I then pressed the Enter button on the remote, the unit 
sat there playing the menu video. I actually put the elapsed time OSD on 
the screen and watched it playback the 3:00 min or so menu (I make menus 
with no sound track several minutes long - it appeared to solve some 
problems on the other DVD players). Moving or attempting to move the 
cursor arround with the arrows or use the number pad on the remote to 
run the main movie track did not work.

I can't quite put my finger on what might be the root cause of these 
problems, and I really have no idea where to start, so I ask what are 
other peoples experiences?


Regards,

-- 
Scott Pitcher

*** Use the source Luke, use the source!



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