DVD will not play on some DVD player's

[mark b]

I have edited my first movie onto videostudio 11.5 plus, burnt it onto a dvd-r disc it works great on some players but not at all on others I have tried different discs, the players say they can play +or- disc's . I have just tried it on a Ritek disc but they all seem the same , is it something I am doing wrong
Mark

[Ken Berry]

Welcome to the forum and the wonderful world of differing DVDs and players! Sadly, you are not alone. With burned discs (as opposed to commercial DVDs which are pressed, not burned), you will find that some DVD burners and players react differently to different discs. With players, it is often the higher end, more expensive brand name ones which are the most picky about what they will play. Some don't like certain brands or batches from the same brand of blank DVD; some don't like certain coloured dyes used on some blanks; some don't like +R, some don't like -R, some don't like RW discs. The list goes on. (By contrast, I have found that the el cheapo unknown brand name ones from China will play just about anything round and silver that you put in them!!)

There is not much you can do about it, I am afraid. Various people have favourite brands of discs which they maintain will work better with certain kinds of DVD burners. I happen to (mostly) use Ritek discs myself like you, and find they work just fine on my various DVD burners -- I have 3 LG burners, 2 Pioneers (one of them a SATA burner); 1 ASUS and 1 Rite-On. And I distribute my burned discs fairly widely and only very rarely get a complaint about it not playing back on a stand-alone player.

One thing I always do, though, with a video DVD is to burn at a low speed. With my Riteks, I burn them at 4x speed if the burner will allow it, or 6x if that is the minimum speed allowed by a particular burner. Some people believe burning speed is largely irrelevant. But my experience has been that when I use a much higher speed, or the maximum speed rated for a particular disc, then I often get skipping during the DVD playback... Burning at slower speeds, at least to me, seems to allow the signal to be burned more "firmly" into the disc, and thus make it potentially more ready to be read correctly by a wide variety of lasers in stand-alone players.

[babdi]

Ken
Your arument seems valid. Referring to skipping you mentioned in your post, after it is burnt will "Verify DVD" help ?

[skier-hughes]

verify dvd will help for you to now it has burned properly, but in this case it works on one player, so should in theory be fine.

Another items to look at is bitrate, some payers won't play high bitrates, so I stick to a max of 8,000 which includes audio.

[Ken Berry]

Graham has just given another possibility why things might have gone wrong for some people. As I said originally, there is probably not all that much you can do to guarantee your DVDs will play on all players, but you can at least minimise the number it won't play on if you use a decent blank (which IMHO you are doing), burn relatively slowly, and as Graham has advised, keep the bitrate well below the maximum allowed for DVDs...

[Black Lab]

You don't say how long your project is, but I have had problems playing discs that are "full". What I mean by that is, when the burned area of the disc is near the out edge (getting into the Red in the burn module) I seem to have problems with discs skipping or stopping alltogether.

When I get into the Red I know to adjust the bitrate which usually solves the problem.

[Bob Hughes]

I have found my presentations play on most machines but not all

Have you looked at this site. It is interesting but I don't know how accurate
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
The program is obtained from here
http://dvd.identifier.cdfreaks.com/

Bob

[2Dogs]

I would be surprised if the playback problems related to an excessive bitrate. As far as I know, all set top players can play commercial movie discs, which almost universally use a video bitrate of 9100 kbps or greater.

Some older players might have problems with DVD+R media. This can usually be remedied by ensuring that your DVD burner sets the "booktype" to "DVD-ROM" when burning the DVD+R disc. Many burners will do this automatically, but you can set the booktype using Nero or separate utilities such as the Q Suite for BenQ burners.

As a general rule, DVD-R media is more compatible with set top players. There is a problem with certain Samsung burners, however. They write an excessively long "lead-in" to DVD-R discs, which can result in playback problems. Thus far, the only way to resolve the problem is to cross-flash the burner with oem firmware from the Korean site, since even the latest US or European firmware has not fixed it.

I'm not a big fan of Ritek blank media, so my recommendation would be to try some other reputable brand, such as Sony or Verbatim. For best results, use premium grade Taiyo Yuden media, usually only available online for not much more than the discount prices on common media. Any given burner will work best with certain blank media - so the trick is to find out what suits your burner.

If yours is a smoking household, it might also be worth trying a cleaning disc, since nicotine condenses onto every surface, including the laser lens.

The first step with poor quality media would be to try burning again at one or two speed steps down - eg 12x or 8x for 16x media.

[skier-hughes]

I would be surprised if the playback problems related to an excessive bitrate. As far as I know, all set top players can play commercial movie discs, which almost universally use a video bitrate of 9100 kbps or greater.

I was under the impression that commercial diss used a much lower bitrate, something in the order of 4-6kbps, ensuring quality by using multi pass (In the region of 20) encoding, using very high end and expensive encoders.

SO, I demuxed a House season 2 disc to look at the encoding used.
VBR max 6,000kbps.

Also, while we are on the subject of commercial discs, they are glass mastered and pressed rather than being burned, which makes them far superior in the compatibility stakes.

Another item to look at is the method of encoding the mpeg2 file and the quality of the encoder. If variable encoding was used what settings were chosen, setting a max to high can casuse peeks in the encoding which could make the dvd wobble in dvd players. Was chapter 8 a point that had a fair bit of movement in it?
Was CBR chosen? CBR is not a constant bitrate by any means, it is just a constant between two given points, again a cbr setting too high can lead to peaks at moments of fast change, movement etc.

I found the mail from a friend of mine whose written several books on encoding and here is his idots guide,
CBR - Constant Bitrate
Goal: Constant bitrate through encoding
The bitrate does not vary up or down - it remains constant.
This produces constant size but variable quality.

1-pass VBR - Single pass Variable Bitrate
Goal: Constant quality through encoding
The bitrate varies from the base video bitrate up to the defined max video bitrate.
When the complexity of the video increases, the bitrate will be increased up to the max video bitrate.
This produces constant quality but variable size (assuming the max bitrate is sufficient to reproduce the complex video sections).

2-pass VBR - Two pass Variable Bitrate
Goal: Set average bitrate with variable instantaneous bitrate
The bitrate varies up to the defined max video bitrate, with the overall average maintaining the defined base video bitrate.
When the complexity of the video increases, the bitrate will be increased up to the max video bitrate but bitrate in areas of lower complexity will be decreased in order to "free" bits for the complex sections.
This produces constant average quality and constant size (assuming the max bitrate is sufficient to reproduce the complex video sections and the defined average bitrate is not so low that bitrate peaks create poor quality in lower-bitrate sections).

Very important points:
1) CBR is fastest, 2-pass VBR is slowest (assuming same Speed/Quality settings)
2) 2-pass VBR is not necessarilly better than 1-pass VBR - especially if predictable size is not a concern.

An easier way to think about it:
CBR is like a straight cylinder. Its size is constant throughout.
1-pass VBR is like a balloon - it can increase as necessary but won't get bigger than the max you set.
2-pass VBR is like a bean bag - some parts can have more beans, other parts can have little or no beans, but overall - it's always a set number of beans.

The only comment I would make is that these are general guidelines. Many users come away after reading this that CBR is inferior to VBR. Certainly CBR set at 5000 to fit 2 hours of video on a disc would be inferior to VBR setting of 5000 average and 8000 max. There will be scenes where 5000 is more than enough and CBR will look just as good as the VBR footage at the same segment, but there are going to be scenes where more bitrate is needed, and the 5000 setting will fall short and look inferior to the VBR file at that same point.

Putting it another way, if one has only an hour of video that they are going to put on a disc, then they aren't concerned about file size. They can set the CBR at 8000, and it should be pretty darn close visually to what any VBR setting with a max of 8000 would give, if not better. The VBR encoded file shouldn't really have any segments encoded higher than the CBR file, and may potentially drop to a lower bitrate than what you would like just by the way it analyzed the file. I have had some graphics quicktime files created in India Pro that look better with CBR than they do with VBR because the bitrate dropped fairly low during the encode when it shouldn't. Since you can't put a minimum on how low it can go in Procoder, that can be a problem with some encodes. Impression Pro from Pinnacle struggles with playback of very low bitrates, and for that reason files that I encode from graphics programs (primarily as intros or motion menus for dvd's) I use CBR.

Time and place for each setting made.

section VBR vs CBR: All modern video codecs are variable (in bitrate) in the sense that not every frame uses the same number of bits as every other frame.---- Even codecs labeled "CBR" can vary data rate quite a bit throughout the file.

section Buffered v whole file data rate control: For example, for a five-second buffer, the data rate for each five seconds must be the same. This isn't a question of multiple, discreet five-second blocks, but that any arbitrary five seconds plucked from the file must be at or under the target data rate. This is also called sliding window and CBR.

Just to summarize, the cbr mode is not an absolute constant for every frame. It is a constant over a buffered period along the timeline of the file. The buffer period slides along the timeline of the file and is equivalent to the concept of moving average. But at any one single point, it is not a constant.

So, going back to the quality of the encoder, if a poor encoder was used and this led to a semi corrupt mpeg file, the pc dvd player, with it's lower tolerances may well be able to skip the corrupted part of the file and keep going, wehreas the dvd player may baulk at it and stop.

In my experience the more expensive and higher end the dvd player the lower the compatibility is.