VS9 Video Audio Hiccups Problem/Solved: It Was Blank Media

[whoppke]

Hello All,
I am a newbie. After using Trial Version of VS9 I bought retail box to make a DVD of my daughters wedding using just still pictures mixed with some motion text from Ulead Cool 3d program. There was no camcorder input used. The motion text was in AVI format.
I studied this forum and followed the sticky post procedure. I burned to a DVD RW and tested on stand alone DVD player. Went back and forth making tweaks to production and burning to DVD RW again until I had it just the way I wanted it. This was going to be great. Now for the final burn. I grabbed a blank DVD-R popped in and burned away using my hard disk video file just as proper procedure called for.
I was appalled to find that the 'final' DVD-R had video and audio drops especially in the first minute! How could that be when the DVD RW had played flawlessly in VS9 and in the stand alone DVD players???
The solution:
I remembered that my Plextor 712 DVD Drive/Burner had some software that came with it called PlexTools. Using these tools you can insert a blank disk or a written disk, either CD or DVD, and perform quality tests on it to see just how good the manufacturing process was on it. It will test and tell you whethere you could expect to burn at full rated speed or whether there were flaws in the blank disk that may impead your burn. There are about 7 different test you can do with that software.
I put my just completed and finalized production DVD-R(Phillips) in the drive and ran a quality check on it and found that, in fact, the quality was inferior. I then pulled out my Phillips and TDK blank DVD spindles and ran tests on those and found that, so far, about one third of the blank discs are shaky from a little to more.
I took a new blank DVD-R that I had Plextor tested very uniform for quality and writeability and burned my production anew. PERFECT! No audio or video problems.
I might also point out that it may depend on your standalone DVD player. We have three in our house. My production DVD-R plays perfectly on my Pioneer DVD player and our Sansui. But our JVC player does not read the disk so well and a few dropouts in audio but not video.
So, in retrospect, even brand name blank media spindles may have some individual disks that are worse than others in that same spindle.
So now when I am ready to make that big final burn in future projects I am going to run some blank disks thru my Plextor software and pick the best.
Finally, my compliments to all the members and posters on this board who take the time to help others. You are appreciated.
Wayne
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[Ken Berry]

And thank you in return for adopting the meticulous approach you have, and then posting the results here. It is a signal lesson in the often arbitrary-seeming results a lot of people get. If I may, I might also inject a footnote to your experience: from time to time I have also mentioned that, because of the unpredictability of blank media, burning a DVD at lower speeds will, other things being potentially unequal, at least promote the probability of a successful burn. Slower speeds will in effect allow the burner's laser to burn the signal more accurately into the disc's tracks, whereas higher speeds suggest that the burn might be a little more superficial. If you have a slightly shonky blank disc to start with, then that could be a recipe for another drink coaster. Personally, though I usually use 8x or even 12x blanks, I never burn faster than 4x.

Your experience with the three brand-name DVD players in your house also underlines the fact that there is no guarantee that home-made DVDs will necessarily play in every commercial DVD player (which are essentially made to play commercial DVDs which, unlike our home-made3 product, are pressed rather than burned). There is at least a good spread of experience on this Board which suggests that the more expensive the brand, the higher the likelihood that the player will be very finicky about what it will or will not play. (The type and quality of the media may be two, though not the only, factors involved in this.) And equally generally, the cheaper the brand (e.g. many of those cheap players exported in huge bulk from China), the more likely they are to play anything put in them!! That certainly has been my experience, with the curious result that my more expensive brand-name player has now been exiled to my beach house, and a cheap Chinese player, which I bought at a supermarket nearly two years ago for much less than half the price of the brand name one, happily plays anything I throw at it. This even included, at the start, home made discs which the other player would not even recognise (the dread 'No disc' msg) and which I had been on the point of dumping!

[brianosmi]

Knock on wood... So far I've never had any problems with Memorex or Maxell (even at full speed - 16x).

As far as compatibility with home players, in my opinion, you definitely took the safest route with DVD-R media. It is, I believe, the most compatible out of any format.