DVD skipping frustration

I have gone through various seetings and DVDs and still haven't been able to find a good label, brand and type of DVD to burn onto that won't skip.

Does anyone have any suggestions for:

1.) Which label, brand, model/serial number of DVD type to use when burning on a G5 mac, and

2.) Does anyone know what settings I need to adjust to slow down the burning process so it will prevent skipping on Studio DVD Pro and/or my AV/Preferences/System settings? Thanks!

Are you setting your bitrate too high? Have you cleaned your DVD drive in the last little while?

As for disc stock, I like Fujis and Sonys, while Maxell has also gotten high marks in here. Don't use Verbatim or Memorex unless you need coasters. But before we go blaming the disc stock, we should review your process. Give us more detail. How do you prep your media? If you're using DVD Studio Pro, which version, and what settings? What's your DVD drive?

I think the consensus in here is that no DVD will play in 100 per cent of all players. What's your "control" player, the one you use to verify the finished disc?

1. The DVD blank is not causing your video to skip.

2. Encoding at a higher bit rate than the playback device can decode is a primarily reason for erratic playback.

I have great success with the Ritek Ridata from Meritline. I am using the 8X white printable DVD-R's and they are very reliable.

Do some reading of this, and the other white papers at Ken Stone's site.

[www.kenstone.net]
Matt Murray
Lineside Productions
Wellington, FL
[www.edgesportfishing.com]
Florida Sailfish videos, pictures and more

Thousands of discs burned, extremely rare to have any coasters.

At the duplicator down the street, they have a machine which "grades" your encode from A-F. If you get an A or B, you can burn. If you get a lower score, you can at least re-encode and try again.



Kevin Monahan
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<<<Thousands of discs burned, extremely rare to have any coasters.>>>

Did you start out having coasters? What did you fix?

If you never had coasters, then you lucked out something fierce, or you're producing coasters and nobody is telling you. What is your Quality Control player?

Koz

Mount a blank disk as a data disk instead of Studio Pro or iDVD. Copy 4G worth of files over to it and burn. They don't have to be video files. Spreadsheets and text pages work. Do that three times. That will clear your burner of being broken.

Never encode over 7. Seven and over kills older players. Encode the sound as AC3 instead of PCM. That will give you another layer of stability. I think Apple or maybe Ken Stone has the instructions how to do that.

No, I agree. Skipping isn't the disk itself. It's the data preparation.

Koz

Greg,

I have used Pioneer AO series drives, mounted as a pair in an external 2-bay firewire enclosure, and Toast to do my burning for the past 2 years. I use 2 instances of Toast to burn to both burners simultaneously. I test in a cheapo "Oritron" player as well as an older Panasonic player. I don't think I've ever experienced more than 1 out of 100 failing on the burn, and have never had a disc returned (these are used by facilitators to teach classes, so typically failures would be reported). I also encode at 2-pass 4.0/5.5, so that helps a lot with player compatibility and looks fine (especially when projected over a cheap LCD projector in a lit conference room).

However, recently I have encountered a really wierd problem where slide shows would cause some players to crash or to behave erratically. This problem appears to be a problem at the software level with DVDSP and/or Toast (Panther, DVDSP 3, Toast 6). I got the problem to go away by clearing my caches and preferences, so I don't think Ritek gets any blame.

<<<I don't think I've ever experienced more than 1 out of 100 failing on the burn>>>

No. For you the moons and stars lined up. Most people look at me funny when I insist on more than one Quality Control player.

The datarate restrictions help a lot. We went from 7.5 to 6.8 and the success rate went to the moon.

We have the additional restriction that the same people who just spend billions of dollars in an Inferno Bay are now looking at our encoded work.

Not flexible these people.

Koz