Menus vs No Menus and playability

[Dr. DOS]

Here's a wierd one... i just completed the family 2004 2 disc DVD set... authored with DVD Movie Factory V3. Plays on 4 dvd players I have including a vintage (it hates everything) Sony. (-R's on Maxell TY media)

Gave a set to dear ole Dad and he cannot play it (desktop player errors out). But on his POS JVC it does play an Audio DVD that I provided him at xmas created with https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=Audio_DVD_Creator

(Again -R media)

Lets see, we tried +R's +RW's and some other (FUJI) -R's... the only thing I can think of is possibly the menu is causing a problem.

Anyone encounter this problem in the past.

[yoda313]

Hello,

Well... have you tried a MOVIE ONLY autoplay disc yet?????

Kevin

[tphaggerty]

What was the bitrate you encoded at? Quite a few DVD players have trouble with "normal" bitrates on recordable media. I am running into this problem right now (and it is a big one, I have over 50 home movies that I have already encoded at a max rate of 9000). From what I can gather, the consensus is that recordable DVDs should not have a max bitrate above 8000, and some say quite a bit lower (I've seen 6000).

With a really good encoder (Canopus Procoder, CCE SP2 etc) you can go really low (4000 or so) and still have great quality. DVD Movie Factory2 (which I have as well as Procoder, CCE Basic, Mainconcept and TMPGenc) is probably going to have some problems encoding to a lower bitrate, but give it a try. Plus, MovieFactory2 only encodes audio as PCM, which is standard but uses about 1800 of the available bitrate (vs 224 or so for MPEG2 or AC3 audio).

So, as an experiment, try encoding your video to a video bitrate of 6000. This will give you a total bitrate of about 7800, and that should work on most DVD players. If that works, you can try bumping up until it doesn't work. You will probably wind up with more than the 2 DVDs.

[paggps]

Hello. I'm having a somewhat similar problem: family videos authored to DVD by myself. They play OK in PCs and in a very recent DVD Player, but does not play on a 2-year old Philips 703.
Thinking about it: I am burning the DVDs with the option "DATA" (and selecting the video_ts and audio_ts folders in my HD). The other Nero option is to burn "DVD FILES". I don't know if they are the same but with the _ts folders added automaticaly, or Nero burns the DVD with something different.