Burn DVD with Ulead VS9 or Nero

[Eric VS9]

I have read a few posts on burning DVD with VS9 VS something like Nero
I have found that Ulead does not like some disc manufactures but Nero will
burn almost anything. I always burn at 4x and I do find that when I burn
with Nero I have little compatibly problems with customers dvd players.

My question is this If I burn a DVD with Ulead VS9

and let Nero give me the disc info
It reads (ISO9660,UDF)
application the made it was... N/A

If I burn with Nero
It reads ISO 9660 Joliet , UDF
as well it knows the application the made it was Nero

So what is the difference and is Joliet good ?
is there a reason the the Nero burns seem better

Thanks Eric

[tyamada]

I found VS9 to be unreliable when it comes to burning making DVDs. I get costers approximately 99% of the time when using any Ulead burning program. I make my projects either write DVD folders or an ISO image and burn with NERO.

I have also found DVD -R/RW disk to be more compatable with stand alone DVD players.

Case in point, I created a DVD+R disk for a friend of mine, the disk would not play in his DVD player. I created the same DVD only on -R disk, it played on his player.

He had to get rid of his +R disks because they wouldn't play in his player.

[bstansbury]

I have VS5,6,7,8,and VS9 and I have never burned a disk with VideoStudio. It goes way back to when I was first burning CD's with Nero and suffering through all the problems people were having with that. Finally Nero fixed there problems and I have kept that version of Nero and never let go of it. I am very careful about testing any updates of Nero before I accept it. Even then I burn the first 2 or three tests on R/W disk and test them in everything I have.

Nero is up to version 7,... great,... I'm still at Nero 5.5.10. The old saying is,.. if it ain't broken don't fix it. Therefore when I went to Burning DVD's and used Nero, it worked fine once I found a good media. I've used Memorez, Fuji, Sony, and Verbatum and I've stuck with Verbatum because I get the best price from Sam's Club and it always works. Recently I got a new DVD+R/W Dual Layer recorder that will burn up to 16x speed. Then I got some Verbatum that are rated at 8x. So I tested and burn about 30 DVD's at 8x. Then last week I found out that several DVD's would not play the 8x disks. They got all kinds of pixelation and lock up an skips. I then re-burnt the DVD's at 6x and that plays fine in the same DVD unit. The DVD that wouldn't play the 8x was a brand new Sony combo DVD/VCR. Check the media section of VCDHelp.com.

[Ken Berry]

I, on the contrary, have used the Ulead burning engine to actually burn discs since I first started video editing back with VS7, and the only problem I have had was when I inadvertently installed InCD as part of the Nero 6 suite. That took over my burners. But when I uninstalled it, the problem went away. But I have not had any problems with the Ulead module. And here I should add that while I still use the VS9 module, I perhaps more regularly use Movie Factory 4 to peoduce my discs. It is somewhat more sophisticated in the building of menus and other things -- though the burning engine itself is identical to that in VS.

As I say, I regularly burn my own productions with it on a variety of DVD blank media (Ritek, Princo, Verbatim), and they don't seem to have any compatibility problem, playing in a wide variety of stand-alone DVD players. I think bstansbury hit the nail on the head when he raised the burning speed question. I have tended to rant in the past here, on a couple of occasions, about not using too high a burning speed, regardless of what the blank disc might be rated at. Personally, I always use 4x (though once or twice 6x) even on discs rated at 12x. I believe the lower speed allows for a more consistent, even and 'deeper' burn of the signal. End of rant-ette!

This is not to say I have no time for other burning programs. I now have Nero 7, and have used it and Nero 6 on literally hundreds of occasions for a wide variety of purposes, including burning discs -- and including the occasional 'mass auto da fé' of burning ISOs I have created of my Video Studio-produced 'masterpieces' for a relatively wide distribution. It's just that I tend to prefer the menus I can construct in VS9 or MF4 over those in Nero, if you are talking about actually putting a DVD together from DVD-compatible video clips. I have to say, though, that Nero 7 has a much better set of tools for this now than its predecessor had.

[heinz-oz]

I also have not used any third party burning programs for burning my DVD/SVCD creations. I must add though, I don't use VS, the last one I used was VS 5 with a DVD plugin. I use MSP 7.3 and burn my movies with MF 3 Disc Creator.

Any other burning tasks I need to perform are done using Nero 6 on my Laptop and the BurnItNow program that came with my DVD burner (Pioneer) on my home PC.

[sgronow]

I personally use Nero.


I get VS to write either an ISO file or a VIDEO_TS and burn from that.

When I tried VS I had nothing but failed Discs.

I use Pioneer DVD Drives

[Eric VS9]

Just to clarify I do use VS9 to make the DVD and burn it my hard drive
VIDEO_TS AND AUDIO_TS and then use Nero DVD Video Compilation
to burn to DVD so all the menus and links a built in VS9


but my question is what is the term Joliet is this a clue
as to why Nero discs seem to be more compatible with other dvd player
All burns are done at 4x never more


ULEAD BURN
It reads (ISO 9660,UDF)
application the made it was... N/A


If I burn with Nero
It reads ISO 9660 Joliet , UDF
as well it knows the application the made it was Nero

So what is the difference and is Joliet good ?
is there a reason the the Nero burns seem better

Thanks Eric

[rguthrie]

I use VS to burn my DVDs and haven't had any problems other than my old home theatre system was finicky about discs. My new system can read anything. I also use MF3 Burn.Now to make data discs. For me it's quick and it can do DVD-9 (Double Layer) discs. But it seems that different machines react differently...some folks have severe problems with VS and others, like myself, hardly ever (if ever) have any problems. I say go with what you feel most comfortable with and what works for you. If it works fine, there's no need to switch programs.

Ron G.

[Ken Berry]

Eric -- short answer, I am not totally sure. Longer answer in one word: maybe. UDF (which stands for Universal Disc Format), IIRC was a standard developed back in the relatively early days of CDs, towards the late '80s by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA). The then-official CD standards (plain, unadorned ISO 9660 though I think it was then called something else) were found to be too restrictive and different producers of optical storage devices were finding that their products could not talk to certain machines that might not have adhered 100% to the standard. So UDF was developed to make interchangeability more widespread. That was around 1988, I believe.

Needless to say, as time went on (quickly in the informatics world, of course! ) Even the UDF standard started having interchangeability problems, e.g. when people used a character set slightly outside the standard, or when computer operating systems developed to the point of allowing long file names, or when file trees and structures got more complex. So a certain giant informatics company -- yes, good old Microsoft -- started working on these problems in the early 1990s, and in 1995 released the Joliet variant of the UDF standard -- though why they called it Joliet, I have no idea (main technician's name??? ) Joliet allowed longer file names, different disc file structures and characters sets, and quite a few other things besides, though dealing with the structure of the disc rather than the actual data stored, if I understand it correctly. And now, of course, it also applies to the world of DVD.

Here endeth the lecture. Beyond that, I simply don't know. Nero and some higher end burning programs, as we all know, present us with fairly opaque choices as to how we want to prepare our discs -- e.g. using ISO 9660 by itself, with consequent restrictions on length of file names etc, or with Joliet (fewer restrictions), or with what they helpfully call 'ISO 9660: 1999', which I take to be a further variant developed in 1999, though I have no idea what those variations might be! Note, though, that after making this choice, you still have to choose how long file names can be etc!!! There is a further choice available under the separate heading of UDF as to which exact version of the UDF you want to use -- like any 'software', there are various versions and sub-sets working up from version 1.0 to the current (I think) 2.6 -- but I have never gone into the differences between the versions. You may be able to find these on www.osta.org

Anyway, the long and the short of it seems to be that if a disc has been burnt using as its UDF the plain, unadorned ISO 9660 standard, then it is likely to run into machines here and there which are set up slightly outside the strict ISO 9660 standard, and so will not play on them. If the UDF is ISO 9660 PLUS Joliet, then implicitly the disc is supposed to be more widely playable. But as I said earlier, I think this is only from the point of view of the technical structure of the disc, and not the quality of the data (in this case, video) burnt to the disc or the work flow that led to that video... That is why I qualified my indeed long answer with a 'maybe'.

Sorry to have waffled on so long to so little effect. But since you seemed particularly interested in exactly why some disks burnt for clients seemed to have more problems than others, I thought I would indulge myself (again!!! )

[GuyL]

I have used VS7 and VS9 and always burned with video studio and "touch wood" I have yet to have a coaster because of it. I had a bad burner once that caused me grief but it wasn't anything to do with Ulead.

[Eric VS9]

Thanks ken

You really put a lot of time into you answers and I think myself
and others appreciate your responses so again thank you.

I think what your saying is that the Nero burn MAY be a little more compatible then the Ulead burn ??

And at the end of the day that is what I need if I shoot a local dance recital and need to make 70 copies the last thing I want is to have
15 or 20 come back the customer does not care about the plus or minus issue
or maybe there DVD player does not like Dolby 256 only 192 or LPCM

I have only joined the fourm about a month ago after switching from VS8 to VS9 and it has
been a big help I ran into problems with Dolby 256 and 192 seemed to be the answer

all though when I was using VS8 all my DVDs were
Lower field first
Var bit rate 8000
and LPCM Audio
Very little compatibly issues.

So when I switched to 9 I started having problems with compatibility
It has be hard to nail down the problem

I wish there was a very strict format that one could uses to insure
compatibility with many DVD player (high end or cheap )

I really hate getting customers coming back with skipping discs or disk error

So what I think I have learned is this

Sticky: AVOID PROBLEMS: USE RECOMMENDED PROCEDURE FOR VIDEO STUDIO
and then
create the DVD folders in Studio 9
Use LPCM audio ( it worked great in VS8)
I am much less confident with Dolby 256 maybe 192 ??
and let Nero Burn my Master Copies at 4X

The bottom line is I have no idea what DVD player my customers have
and some of my projects require 10 ,20, 80 copies

Thanks Again

[Ken Berry]

As you said yourself, there are so many different types of players out there that it is impossible to know the varied circumstances are going to meet. And so yes, it strikes me that using Joliet probably gives you a small margin of advantage -- though again I stress that this would appear to be mainly in terms of the formal structure of the disc, rather than the specific properties of the data/video being burning to it (though of course this may affect the burn in other ways).

You said: "I wish there was a very strict format that one could uses to insure compatibility with many DVD player (high end or cheap )". Well, the problem really is that they started off with one strict standard, but it turned out to be too strict and the equivalent of one comma being out of place or missing made a disc unplayable on certain players. So they brought out Joliet, and then 'ISO 9660:1999' and have brought out new updated versions of UDF, all because unfortunately both the software developers and users are human, and we all occasionally make mistakes. Give me a perfect program and I will catch the next flying pig to New York!!

[GuyL]

Ah, wait until you have to please both BlueRay and DVD HD!

Is everyone ready for the next round of VHS vs Beta?