"Discs recorded in the VR format cannot be played back"

[cdclark707]

I burned a DVD-R in DVD Workshop 2 and the customer just called to say that their Magnavox TV with built-in DVD player (model 37MD350B/F7) will not play it. He told me that the error message on the screen and the owner's manual say: Discs recorded in the VR format cannot be played back. Only the finalized video format discs can be played back. Some discs cannot be played back because of incompatible recording conditions, characteristics of the recorder or special properties of discs.

This is a first for me. I didn't change any of the settings in DVD Workshop 2 and the disc I used is Disc Makers Ultra DVD-R. I'm using Win 7.

Anybody got any solutions? Thank you.

Carol

[skier-hughes]

WS2 cannot burn a VR disc.
It could just be that the disc you made is incompatible with the player and it shows this message as it's the closest message it can think of............... being a machine

What settings did you choose to author the dvd? bitrates, video and audio, type of audio etc.
reducing bitrate often helps, keep a combined rate to under 8,000. I'll often use 7500 for video and 192/256 for audio. Using ac3 audio or kpcm is much more compatible than mpeg.

Look up the dvd player (tv set) and see if it gives any limits on what it can and cannot play.

[cdclark707]

Thanks, Graham. I bet you're right about the Magnavox error message.

I'm using Adobe Premiere Elements 8.0 to create the AVIs. 720x480, 29.97 fps, Lower, Quality 100; 48000 Hz, Stereo, 16 bit; DV NTSC Standard. I have burned many, many DVD-Rs with these AVIs.

The Magnavox will play DVD-R discs, according to the customer.

I have to think the issue is either the disc (Disc Makers Ultra DVD-R) -- but I find that hard to believe -- or somehow Windows 7 is not playing nice. I believe this is the first time I've burned a DVD-R on this machine. The other machine has a Windows XP OS. Are there compatibility issues with DVD Workshop 2 and Win 7? If so, is there a fix? If not, what software could replace WS2 in a Win 7 environment?

I just burned another DVD-R for this customer, this time on a Sony disc with my XP machine. I'll know next week if this works for them. In the meantime, any insight you can give me about the questions in the previous paragraph would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carol

[Ken Berry]

DVD Workshop is now many years old. A decision was taken by Corel some years ago to discontinue it, and so no fixes or patches are to be expected. It was on the market well before even Vista appeared, let alone Win 7. So it clearly is not Win 7 compliant, even if it runs in the Win 7 environment... In those circumstances, there could be some conceivable clash between Win 7 and some aspects of the program...

In the Corel stable, unfortunately there is no equivalent software which is fully Win 7 compliant. I stress the word 'equivalent' since DVD Workshop was at the prosumer end of the market (and many users regret its passing). The downmarket consumer-level software was DVD Movie Factory, and the last full version of that was MF 7... But it has nowhere near the flexibility of DVD Workshop, though it works well in the Win 7 environment. And even Movie Factory's fate is still uncertain. Corel had apparently decided to scrap it too, and version 7 was only released in a couple of areas of the world. Signficantly, North America was not amongst them. But subsequently, Corel may (but only may) have seen the error of their ways since another silly change they made was in Video Studio version X3 where they dropped the old burning engine of all previous versions, and substituted a piece of rubbish which caused such an outcry that they had to revive Movie Factory 7 in an SE version, which they made available free to X3 users. So there could still be life in the MF camp... We'll see.

MF will certainly make a nice boiler plate menu, though one problem with it is that it will only burn DVDs at the maximum speed allowed by the disc. This would have been one of my suggestions to you in your current problem with DVD Workshop -- to burn your DVD at a lower speed (I generally use no more than 4x). A slow burn seems to embed the signal "deeper" into the disc, or at least allow a wider variety of reading lasers to be able to play it properly.

Outside of Corel products, some people here use DVD Lab. I don't, so can't really comment on how it works. However, it appears to have similar flexibility to DVD Workshop. Going from memory, Sony DVD Architect Studio also gets (or at least used to get) good reviews. I am not even sure, though, if it is still on the market...

[cdclark707]

Thank you so much, Ken, for all the info. I've been using DVD Workshop since 2001 or 2002, so it's like second nature to me. Might be time for a change (and a menu change while I'm at it).

On the other hand, this is the first customer whose hardware couldn't read the DVD-R. I'm hoping that the burn I did today on the Win XP machine will take care of things. If not, then I'll burn at the slower rate as you suggested.

Do you know if there's a notify list in case Corel does update DVD Workshop?

Thanks again. I appreciate your (and Graham's) time.

Carol

[DVDDoug]

I "upgraded" to DVD-Lab ($100 - $250 USD)a couple of years ago, and I'll give you a little summary:

It can make "professional" DVDs with features such as multiple soundtracks and multiple subtitles (depending on the version). As a DVD authoring tool, It's about equivalent to DVD Workshop. It's not as easy to use. It's missing some of Workshop's handy features, but in some ways it's more powerful.

DVD-Lab is a DVD-authoring tool only. There is no MPEG-2 or Dolby AC3 encoder. You have to feed-in DVD-compatible files. No editing or "trimming". I think it can burn DVDs, but it's burning module is limited and I've never used it. You can either make an ISO file or AUDIO_TS & VIDEO_TS folders, and then burn with a separate burning program. (I've been using ImgBurn.)

One thing that's sometimes a real pain is that there's no audio in the preview window. This can make difficult to set the chapter points. Often, I have to play the video in a video editor first, and write-down the chapter times.

Making a playlist is more difficult in DVD-Lab. In Workshop it was a piece of cake!

And, I don't think you can type unlinked text into a menu. You can make a text button, but if you don't link it, it won't show-up on the DVD. You have to create your menu background (including the text) with an image editor or video editor.

DVD-Lab can create motion-transitions between still menus, which is kind-of cool.

You also have full control over the way the menu navigation-buttons work. (i.e. When you scroll through the buttons from top to bottom, you can stop and do nothing, or you can loop-around to the top, etc.)

And you can "group" buttons, so when you select an item you can make a bullet appear and highlight or underline the selected text. Or, you can put a bullet (or other button object) on both the left & right sides of the text, and group them so they highlight/select together.

And, with the high-end version you get a VM command editor, which allows you to tweak the way the DVD works "under the hood". (As you may already know, you can also edit VM commands with PgcEdit (FREE!!!).

BTW - DVD-Lab runs on Windows 7, but it is not being "activly maintained", and, it does not do blu-ray. (I knew this when I bought it, but decided to go-ahead.)

[cdclark707]

Thanks, Doug! I appreciate the information.

Carol