HELP! trouble burning home movies - NERO! jumpy discs.

[wjp666]

urgent advice required! basically, i have problems using Nero to burn. i am creating my own disc (with a selection of mpg files converted from my camcorder).... basically, the mpg files seem FINE. they play fine on the pc etc. there are also no problems when it comes to arranging the disc etc...

i 'burn' the video files/dvd to a video file on my harddrive (easier in case a faulty disc in at hand), and then 'burn video files' to disc using Nero. the disc will play fine for about 8 minutes, and then start JUMPING... by this, i mean freezing, sound-sync probs and seriously irratic jumping all over the place ( as if is losing frames or whatever.) this will last the remainder of the disc... and does it on EVERY player i try. i have used many differentset-ups and files, all with the same results.

fearing a memory problem, i came up with a solution. rather than incorporate all my files into one big 1 hour long video (which i then chaptered), i cut the mpgs together into 3 separate video files... i had some success with these. 2 out of the three 20 minute files worked perfectly, but the other one played for 4 mins then started jumping again. strangely, the one that started jumping was the shortest file by 5 mins, AND the first on the disc.

NOTE: i have successfully 'burnt'/copied standard dvd's with the same pc.

WHAT I USE:
Nero, full version; IBO; dvd burner (internal); 1.20ghz processor; 384 mb ram (sdram); 80 gig harddrive; windows xp (2002). DISC BRANDS: mitsibishi, TDK, maxell - all+.

i have also used a different pc with identiocal results - this one had half a gig of DDR and a 2.7 processor.

ANY IDEAS? its driving me crazy! WJP.

[daamon]

Hi wjp666,

Welcome to the forums.

What tool are you using to encode your (presumably) DV AVI to MPG2?

What are your bitrate settings for video and audio? What audio format are you using?

I had a similar problem once where a disc always skipped at the same place, no matter what disks I used etc. And it was a good DVD player.

It turned out that the bitrate on the video was too high, reducing it from 9,000 to 8,000 solved the problem.

I've later learnt that, although the spec says the max is something like (a total) of 9,800kbps (audio and video together), some DVD players do struggle with higher bitrates.

The other thing is to check whether your DVD player plays "+" disks, and how well people have reported it doing this. Check out "DVD Players" to the left <---.

[harley2ride]

Try some Verbatim MCC +r's, or Taiyo Yuden's. All the media you listed is mediocre at best..

[abc-123]

Also check the framerate at which you encoded your files at. For example, in NTSC land, 29.97 fps is NOT the same as 30 fps and using 30 fps will screw things up.

Just make sure your framerate is right for PAL or NTSC and check that the audio conversion (if it's from/to AC3) was done correctly. Improper audio coding will cause jumpiness also.

[wjp666]

well, thanx for all the feedback. to answer the q's:

i am encoding and editing with the Nero suite, which i have found to be as advanced as i need at the moment (for this kind of thing.) i do all the encoding etc. with Nero. the bitrate is of highest quality (i try to keep it all under 1 hour long) and use 2-pass encoding.

i have just switched to Verbatim+... and to clarify, all my players take +.

HERES THE WEIRD BIT: ive actually had some success since i ;posted the first message. (this is gonna be hard to explain... if anyone out there can understand this, then id love any more info on it!)

RIGHT - first off i'd have an hours worth of video in one clip, then i'd create chapters and burn. it'd play for 5 mins, then start jumping for the rest of the video.THAST WAS THE INITIAL PROBLEM!

THINKING IT WAS MEMORY - i cut then hours worth of footage into 3 parts, so on the main menu it had three animated buttons (and as theyd all play in succession anyway - with a slight 'layer-change' type pause - i thought it would do for now). upon clicking a button, you'd get the sub-menu of the created chapters from that segment etc. CLIP 1 would play for 5 mins, then start jumping. CLIP 2 and 3 (even though longer by 8 mins) would play fine! WEIRD!!! the longer clips playued but the short one didn't.

AS A LAST RESORT, i figuered video 1 may have some kind of 'bug' or whatever - so i kept the 3 video files in tact, but put a 15-second clip of a logo on as a separate video/button... so i now had 4 animated buttons on the title screen. (the old vid.1 was now vid.2, etc) THE LOGIC? the first clip (logo) would not hit the 5 minute mark and 'jump', and in retrospect, if the latter clips which followed clip 1 were NOT corrupted, then maybe (just maybe) all 3 clips would play asfter the 15-second logo.

WELL, it worked. all i needed was to have clip 1 as a short video-clip, and all the ones afterwards played fine.

ANY1 GOT ANY IDEA WHAT THIS MEANS!??!?!?!?!?!

[jimmalenko]

For a problem such as this, you really need to identify all the possible areas that could be going wrong, then isolate them and test them individually.

Now, the fact that you can backup commercial DVDs (presumably using Nero to burn) suggests to me that the burner / media / player side of things is probably OK. This leaves us with encoding and authoring.

TBH, Nero's encoding and authoring skills are not the best IMO. I'd be interested to see the results if you were to do your editing in virtualdub (you say camcorder source so I'm assuming you're transferring to DV-AVI and not capping to MPEG), use Direct Stream Copy on video and audio and save out to a new AVI. Then convert the AVI to MPEG-2 using TMPGEnc Plus and PowerDVD.

Then try burning with Nero, or use TMPGEnc DVD Author's DVD Writing Tool to either burn to disc or to create an ISO and burn with DVD Decrypter. Then try playing the disc on your computer in PowerDVD again.