Problems playing certain discs on DVD player

[fergs24]

Now and again I have problems playing DVD+/-R discs on my DVD player. I use DVD decrypter, DVD shrink and Nero to produce the movie on the disc. Most work but a few pause after around 30 mins or become really badly pixelated and unwatchable. Can anyone help resolve this problem? Could it be that DVD shrink has reduced the quality on large movies so much to get it on the disc that the DVD player cannot read it?

many thanks

[gshelley61]

It sounds like your DVD player's loader is having some trouble reading the discs. Could be the brand or quality of the media, or the loader may need a lens cleaning, or the loader could simply be a little picky.

[rumplestiltskin]

At one time I thought that +/-R's required a lower bitrate (on my players anyway). However, a cheap Philips DVP320 player I have seems to play anything I throw at it.

I have heard that heat buildup in some players can make the mpeg2-decoder chip goofy.

However (and specific to the original post), I have seen some discs I've burned "break up" (visually, not literally!) at certain points in one player that might cause another player to simply choke and stop playing; bad error correction ability?

My guess is that the best thing is to leave the PC (or Mac) alone when it's doing its ripping/transcoding/authoring/burning so nothing can adversely affect the results anywhere down the line during the process.

[fergs24]

thanks for that. Would it also help to turn down the burning speed. Would this help?

I have ordered some different discs also as it seems to be happening more since I got a new batch of bulkpaq discs.

Based on the feedback I will keep my hard disc space as big as possible and not use the pc whilst it is encoding.

If anyone else has had this same problem and somehow overcame it please let me know

cheers

[rumplestiltskin]

Slower burning speed can't hurt anything and might even avoid a buffer underrun if something else on your computer is using more CPU cycles than it should. While a disc that verifies -should- be fine, I must say that I can see a physical difference (on some media) looking at the burned side of two discs that have been burned at, for example, 2X vs 8X.

[fergs24]

Can you recommend media that you have particular success with?

[rumplestiltskin]

I've been using Ritex branded "+" and "-" media although I guess I've standardized on the "+" 8X from meritline. I do, however, occasionally burn at 6x or 4x on my Mac simply because I'm always doing 10 things at once. My PC (which has a DVR-107 8x pioneer) usually burns at 8x. On the PC I use Copy2DVD to burn things I rip with DVDShrink but use the built-in burning facility within TMPG DVD Author if I'm taking mpegs I've captured through my WinTV-250 and burning them (usually to 4x DVD+RW as I'm just time-shifting like it's a VCR). On the Mac I use Toast.