Grrrrr!

[Devil]

Big project, 5 AVI titles. Put in DL disc to burn and it showed 7.9/8.0, with 5500/192 kbit/s V/A CBR and I gave WS-2 its head to encode. 2½ h later, it baulks, telling me there ain't enough disc room. Checked the ISO file and it was 8.03 Gb. Have reduced the V bitrate to 5300 kbit/s and it now says 7.8/8.0. Another 2½ hours for a project that should be finished for tomorrow morning. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I realise that the disk space is only an estimation, but I would have thought 100 Mb was enough slack.

Warning to all: leave more slack than you think

[skier-hughes]

I do!!!

Though I make my mpegs out of WS and tend to go for 4gb max on a SL disc.

[DiscCoasterPro]

Wow, this just happened to me last night! Not with a double layer disc but with one that said 4.2 /4.4 I believe.

I was so angry that it didn't at least save an image to disc of what it did. I had to drop the bit rate 500 and do the whole thing over again.

Yet another good reason for DVDWS 3

[sjj1805]

I tend to convert my AVI formats to MPEG2 with a Video Editing program before passing them to DVD Workshop. All that DVD Workshop does is produce the DVD Menus and obviously converts everything to VOB files etc.

Most of my DVD Workshop projects only take from 5 - 30 minutes until reaching the burning stage because the videos themselves do not require conversion. This also reduces the amount of disc space required by DVD Workshop.

[Devil]

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I restarted last night and everything went well -- at first! It accepted everything and I gave it the go-ahead. It encoded everything and then started to burn the disc. Great, thinks I! Until I go back to see whether it had finished (at midnight). It had glitched after burning 93% of the project: 3 h 55 min 11 s into the project and a DL coaster.

Have restarted this morning.

Steve: I too usually encode first but it is difficult to get an ideal fit when you have multiple titles of varying length (these vary from 15 to 85 minutes). I aim for 4.0 to 4.1 Gb for SL. This is only my 2nd DL project and the first with this burner. The earlier one panned out at ~6.5 Gb and went easily. With DL, DVD-RW cites 8.0 Gb capacity. This is wrong: it is apparently 7.916 Gb. With the inaccuracy of estimations (especially with VBR), I'm coming to the conclusion that a target project length should be ~ 7.5 Gb, which is what I'm using for today's attempt.

[Devil]

Third time lucky. At a video bitrate of 5000 kbit/s, with WS-2 showing a project length of 7.5 Gb, it burnt purrfectly (ie no CATastrophe this time).

Conclusion: for DL keep your project to a max of 7.5 Gb in WS-2.

[sjj1805]

I don't burn directly to Disc. I prefer to create a DVD Hard Drive Folder.
This helps prevent wasting discs if something goes wrong whilst the DVD is being created.

[Devil]

Sorry, Steve, that would not help in the case of too large a project: you would not know until you had done the encoding. In my second try, I would have done exactly the same.

[GeorgeW]

Burning DVD Folders can be helpful because you can then run the folders through DVDShrink (works OK if you don't try to compress it too much).

Having the folders can also be played back using WinDVD or PowerDVD (to check navigation and playback). There are also tools that can work with the ISO Image (if that's what you prefer).

Regards,
George

[Devil]

Yup, I always make an ISO image for further burning.

I checked the DL disc before giving it to the person concerned. On my Philips DVP520, it would not play. On my LG V190 and computers, it played perfectly.

[GeorgeW]

When you say it would not play -- do you mean the disc was not recognized at all, or it would play, but then stop.

Did you set the booktype to DVD-ROM?

Regards,
George

[Devil]

Was not recognised. It said 'Insert disc'.