DVD Freezing on set-top player

[John Wray]

I've been transferring some VHS recordings to DVD-R, and the process has got quite automatic - capture with AVI_IO from my Hauppauge WinTV, filter and frameserve from VirtualDub into TMPGEnc to encode to MPEG-2, then burn to DVD-R with DVD MovieFactory. Using the default 384 kbps audio bitrate and a video bitrate of 5400-5700, I can get a ~ 1:40 program onto a DVD-R.

However, a recent thread pointed out that you can reduce the audio bitrate in TMPGEnc (even though the option is initially grayed-out). So I tried reducing the audio rate to 192 kbps, which let me up the video rate to 6?00 for the same program length. However, although the resulting DVD plays fine on my computer, it freezes and breaks up on my JVC set-top player. So I'm trying to figure out why, without wasting lots of time and DVD-R blanks with random experiments. Can anyone suggest why reducing the audio bitrate and increasing the video rate could cause problems for my JVC? The disks I've burned using 384 kbps audio have worked fine in the player.

John

[Brian Ellis]

My guess is that you are now exceeding the video bitrate that your set can handle. If you record a shorter item at the higher video bitrate and the normal audio one, what happens?

[wkulecz]

My guess is his player is incompatible with DVD-R. In my tests JVC was one of the two brands where dulicates of nominally the same player -- one worked the other didn't.

Try playing the disk in a Sony NS315, if it freezes then it is the disk or encoding/authoring. If it plays, then he needs a new player or might try copying the disk to DVD+R, but this has a rather small chance of success and is probably not worth the trouble -- but it has worked for my Zenith player.

The Sony NS315 is the cheapest player I know about that is advertising DVD-R and DVD+RW support. Mine plays all the DVD-R I made last October glitch-free, along with DVD+RW/R. Can be had for about $130.

I thought the spec says all players must handle 9800Kbps combined audio and video -- not that buggy players aren't out there. I'm sure Doc will straighten me out if I've picked up misinformation as I certainly don't have the $$$ to cough up for a copy of the DVD specs.

If a player can't read 9800Kbps from a DVD-R its not compatible. Very few comercial movies lack scenes that sometimes exceed 9000Kbps acording to my Toshiba player's bit rate viewer.

I thought Ulead's DVD template defaults to 224 Kbps layer2 audio or am I confusing NTSC and PAL?

--wally.

[John Wray]

Originally posted by wkulecz
My guess is his player is incompatible with DVD-R. In my tests JVC was one of the two brands where dulicates of nominally the same player -- one worked the other didn't.

I've not had any problems with this player on my "regular" settings (384 kbps audio and up to around 5700 video bitrate); It reads DVD-R media fine (I've used various different brands of DVD-R blanks without problems). This is a current model JVC player.

Originally posted by wkulecz
I thought the spec says all players must handle 9800Kbps combined audio and video -- not that buggy players aren't out there. I'm sure Doc will straighten me out if I've picked up misinformation as I certainly don't have the $$$ to cough up for a copy of the DVD specs.

If a player can't read 9800Kbps from a DVD-R its not compatible. Very few comercial movies lack scenes that sometimes exceed 9000Kbps acording to my Toshiba player's bit rate viewer.

Yes, I can't believe that I'm running into the maximum total bitrate of the player (otherwise I'd expected to run into problems with superbit movies, at the very least).

Originally posted by wkulecz
I thought Ulead's DVD template defaults to 224 Kbps layer2 audio or am I confusing NTSC and PAL?

I'm not using ULead to encode; I'm using TMPGEnc. I think DVD MovieFactory just de-multiplexes the combined stream that TMPGEnc produces; it shouldn't need to do any other transformation of either audio or video (should it?)

John

[wkulecz]

I think trying your disk on a player that is known to be and advertized as DVD-R compatible (like the Sony NS315) will be the best way to resolve the issue.

DVD Movie Factory has some compliance checking built in, don't know how good it is though.

--wally.