AC3 track causing problems

[lemmy999]

A friend of my wife's was fooled by one of those websites that claim their DVDs are authentic and legit, but they just happen to have chinese characters on the box. She had problems playing some of them. some would freeze and on others she couldn't get the english audio track to play. She wanted me to take a look at them to see what was wrong. All of them have a chinese and english audio track. They all play fine on my computer, and 3 other DVD players. But on one of my DVD players (Pioneer DV333) when the english dolby digital audio is selected there is a loud buzz, then the video freezes, if I change the audio back to the Chinese Dolby digital track, it begins playing again. I told her that the problem is that they are illegal chinese bootlegs. She argued with me, but I have finally convinced her. However, I am still curious why the dolby digital english track is causing a problem on only one of my DVD players. Is it just a non-standard dolby digital track...if so, why does it play fine on everything else?

[classfour]

The older Pioneers have problems with AC3 audio encoded by BeSweet. If this is a pirated or reauthored DVD, the audio may have been re-encoded at some point??? I have DV343 (1 model up, pretty much the same), and it has issues with some discs - I stopped using it for the same reason when playing back a DVDR that I'd encoded the audio track with BeSweet. This was well before I learned (on VideoHelp) of the issues some Pioneers have with some AC3 audio. I did not run into any audio playback problems on any of the other DVD players that I've played the same disc(s) on - but really miss the picture quality on the retired Pioneer.

[lemmy999]

Yeah, you are probably right. I agree the picture quality is good on the Pioneer. I have never discovered this problem with the DV333 because I have always had issues creating DD audio with BeSweet on my own DVDs. So I have always had to use SoftEncode. Unfortunatley SoftEncode is extremely slow. Thanks.