Suspecting bugs in the dvdplayer...

About 3 month ago, i encountered some problem while authoring a dvd that's over 4 hours long.
description of the problem can be found in this thread:
[www.lafcpug.org]
Here's the second half of the investigation, and some interesting findings -
1. I've tried to play the Double layer disk in a pc and found no problem playing back...
2. go back using a mac playing back with the dvdplayer - problem occured...

my guess is that, there's a glitch in the dvdplayer, when playing back a single track that's longer than 3 hours.
i've always thought that it was something about the DVDSP, but
To prove my guess, i hope people who had the same problem can try to varify or give this experiment a try. Of course, if i'm wrong or this is a known problem that everyone is aware of it - please comment as well.

Thank you very much...

As this disc plays back on a PC with no problems and was burnt onto a Double Layer (DVD+R) disc, it could be a problem with the Apple DVD Player, or perhaps the Mac's abilty to play +R discs.

Your former post says that using the DVD Player software it froze up playing at about 3 hours and 18 minutes, but when you broke that one 4 hour clip into two, then it plays OK.

I have never authored a 4 hour DVD and have never ever heard from anyone who has. I suppose there could be an issue with software or maybe using a DVD+R disc on a Mac.

I'll just bet that you had to encode that 4 hours of MPEG at a really low BitRate to make the file small enough to fit onto a DL disc of 8.5 GB (I know you said 7.1)

I would be interested in finding out what happens if you burn this onto a DVD-R disc and try it?

Thanks John for your info,
when i try to play back the dvd, I actually tried both, playing back from the actual disk, and the Video_TS folder on my hard drive. I could see that DVD+R might be an issue, but playing back from the HD shouldn't have anything to do with the disk format and it still freeze at the point.
I am still gonna try it out with the -R, cause that might solve my other playback issues that's not as odd as this.

Interesting, i guess fitting the 4 hours long footage with really low bit rate is not so desirable as the picture quality drops dramattically. Maybe that's why nobody's ever done that.

There's no problem that the disk can have more than 4 hours of footage, but just not on one single track, i assume, and that's the bug in the DVDPlayer. Tried VLC, i think it played fine.

Yeah, not too many 4 hour MPEG's out there I guess. Well if there is a problem with the Apple DVD Player, it will change with the next version of Leopard, so - guess we will seeeeeeeee.