My home made DVDs only play for about 10 minutes then stick

[Dig]

I have been makeing some of my own DVDs from video I shot at birthdays and such. I capture the tape from my firewire port and then take it from there and either use DVDA3 or Ulead Movie Factory 5.

I have an IO Magic LightScribe multi 16X drive that has not given me any problems and is only about 6 months old, as a matter of fact my whole system is only about 6 months old. System is a Dell 2.8 with 2GB ram and 2 drives. My d: is for capture and is a Seagate 300GB drive with about 200 GB open. Defrag all the time.

Some of my DVDs work fine and others play for about 10 minutes and then stick or stutter at that point.

I typically use HP blank DVDs.

Not sure what to look for. Any ideas?

Help appreciated.
Thanks

[gadgetguy]

My first thought is media and you confirmed that by saying you use HP. HP does not manufacture their own disks and quality is a crapshoot. Check out www.nomorecoasters.com for information about burnable media.

[redwudz]

First thing always to try is different DVD media. It's the cheapest and easiest thing to change. And what are you playing them on when they 'stick'? Does it do the same on all players?

And do you have the same problems if you back up one of your commercial DVDs with a program like DVD Shrink? If they play with no problems, then I would look to your burning program, or the methods you use to create your home made DVDs.

BTW, if you have that much HD free space and 'Defrag all the time', you may just be wearing out your hard drive prematurely. Defragging is more necessary when your drive is fuller and you move around lots of small files. Video is not generally small and that type of usage doesn't generally create much fragmentation.

[guns1inger]

Start with www.nomorecoasters.com - use something like DVD Info pro to get the media ID, and find out is making it.

Always test your DVDs from the HDD before burning, then test the burn. I like to use DVD Info Pro's Read Test to make sure all the data can be retrieved from the disc.

[pepegot1]

I have similar problems. When I make a DVD+R, and play it on my old JVC DVD Player, it stops about half way through the movie. I have better sucess with DVD-R discs. I use the best media:T.Y., Verbatum, Fugi and TDK-all with similar results. This also happens on my built-in Panasonic TV DVD player.
However, when I play the same DVDs on my Cyberhome 300, a cheap DVD Player, it plays just fine. Yesterday I was showing a movie in our Clubhouse and it crashed on the JVC about half way through. I switched to the Cyberhome and all was well.
The conclusion is that not only does the media contribute to problems, but so does the specific player. In this case, I eliminated the media problem by using the best media.

[oldandinthe way]

I/OMagic buys drives from various manufacturers (more or less whats cheapest at the time). Several of their vendors drives are highly media sensitive. HP makes heavy use of CMC disks. Several of I/OMagic's vendor's drives do not like CMC disks.

Check to find out who manufactured your drive and its real model number. NeroInfoTool will tell you or XP will tell you the device. Check to find out who really made the media.

Use media which are successful with your drive as shown in the DVDMedia lists. (Or just follow the folklore and use Japanese made disks).

[Dig]

Thanks for all the suggestions. After reading through them I decided to try a different media. So I scrummaged around and found a differnt set of blank dvds that I had bought a while ago.

They where HPs but they were a different color and they are +r (I think the others where -r). I reburned the video and played it on my $39 walmart player and it played all the way through with no problems.

So now I am going to give it back to the person and see if it plays on their player.

Thanks for the quick response and great ideas.