Frames Freeze on 2 out of 3 dvd players

[steyener]

I first off have a dvd home theater system and the dvd player is about 4 years old. The dvd player in the first bedroom can't play the movies but the newer one I put in my son's bedroom will play the movies. Will I have to get a new dvd player for the living room to watch these dvd's I'm making??

I knew that I would probably replace the dvd player before too long just because it's getting old. It works just fine but I will have to replace it so I can watch my newly burned dvd's on my best tv.

Since the dvd home theater came sold together...hook the dvd player to the receiver. Can I just replace the dvd player or is there a chance that i'll have to replace the whole thing?

[alph]

If you are using ffmpeg to encode, as in the "DVD ffmpeg" preset your freezing is most likely due to the less than constant bitrate that ffmpeg generates. If this is the case, try using DVD mpeg2enc.

I've not tested this myself, but I'd suspect turning off decode with quicktime with mpeg2enc would also speed things up a little as it does with ffmpeg.

Also, if you are authoring with Toast, it seems that 6.0.9 now does some padding to help minimise the problems that less than constant bitrates cause. I no longer have my old DVD player which had these problems so I've not been able to verify this.

Regards,
Alph

[steyener]

Well..I have been using ffmpeg because I've heard other ppl that use mpeg2enc not getting the video_ts folder. I will try doing it that way, I just want to make sure that I'm not making coasters. I will do the next movie using dvd mpeg2enc and see if it will work on my dvd player. Also what program would you guys suggest to add chapters to my movies. Keep in mind that I'm pretty new to this whole process so a program that isn't very complicated would be very helpful.

[alph]

If DVD mpeg2enc does not create the video_ts folder you can just author it in the Tools tab after the encoding is done.

You might want to consider getting 1 DVD-RW to test your videos with. It sure has saved me from a lot of coasters.

As for chapters, Toast adds chapters every 5 minutes automatically when it authors a previously encoded mpeg, by remultiplexing. If you use Toast to do the actual encoding, it lets you pick the chapter timing: none, or every 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 minutes. As an encoder it is as fast as ffmpeg with quicktime decode, and of about the same quality as mpeg2enc.

Alph