duplication problems fixed by replication???

[sdsumike619]

Well maybe you can help me out once again on this one too:

As you know I've been authoring with DVDWS2. To start off we decided to go with duplication in small quantity. Now we sent some of the duplicated DVDS we got from the plant out to friends. One of our friends told us that he has a 3 year old Sony DVD player and he put the disc in, the menu came up fine, and he's able to do everything EXCEPT skip from chapter to chapter via the buttons on the remote control. He says when he presses them NOTHING happens! Next, he put the same DVD in his computer - oddly enough, the same thing happened with both windows media player and PowerDVD - he wasn't able to skip chapter to chapter. Finally he put it in a $40 APEX player and everything worked fine. I have no clue what all this means. However, we don't want these things coming back to us.

So my question is this: Going to replication is obviously going to result in a heck of a lot of inventory and cost; Is there a way to find out if this error or any other type of error or problem that comes up is related to MY authoring in DVD Workshop2 OR just the fact that it's a duplicated disc? i.e., I don't want to go to replication and have that same error happen again..

All help and input is appreciated!!

Mike

[Paul D]

It sounds like a compatability problem to me. We have recently gone over from having our discs replicated to duplicating them ourselves (with Pioneer 107s).

With replicated discs our returns rate was 0.2%. With duplicated discs it's currently running at 1%. Given that some sources quote compatability for duplicated discs as 85-90%, I think 1% is pretty good, though obviously 0% is better.

Certainly I shudder at the thought of only 85-90% compatability - imagine 15% of the discs you send out coming back to you!!

Unfortunately I haven't yet found a solution for these problem cases. I've tried sending +R discs instead of -R, and discs burnt at 1x, instead of 4x, but none of these has made any difference.

I have seen it said that for duplicated discs you should keep the bit rate below 6.5 Mbps, but I guess that is really to prevent stuttering problems; I doubt whether it affects menu navigation problems.

My burners are Pioneers and don't support bitsetting which is said to improve compatability. I don't claim to understand it, but it might be worth looking into.

[sdsumike619]

Well I used DVD Workshop 2 to author the master and the guy at the plant said it was "well under the acceptable error rate for the DVD spec" I just had another friend test it, he has an apple iBook and same thing for him, can't advance to the next chapter. I paid $130 or so for my Sony DVD Player and it works just fine, I can skip around as much as I want, same with my $79 Emprex DVD writer in my computer, works fine... Is there a way to find out if this error, as well as any others that may arise is attributable to duplication, or the way I authored the DVD?

[sdsumike619]

does anyone know why this is happening? I really need to get it resolved. See the original post. If it works some but not all DVD players, at first I think going to replication would solve the problem. However, then I also thing, well what if it's in the software....is there a bottom line?