DVD-Lab Pro Slideshow glitch?

[ADigitalMan]

I am authoring a disc that has a movie and a slideshow. They are in the same VTS.

When I preview the disc off my hard drive in PowerDVD, the slideshow plays just fine until the end. After the final slide displays and the audio ends, then the drive grinds for about a minute and PowerDVD closes down unexpectedly. The connections I set up do route the slideshow back to the main menu, so I am at a lost as to why it is crashing. Has anybody seen this problem before?

[guns1inger]

Can you post a screenshot of your Connection window ?
Have you tried to recompile the disc ?

[ADigitalMan]

These are my latest settings, which I recompiled last night. The first viewing of the slideshow worked perfectly. The next one, however, pulled the same glitch as described above. It's bizarre. I've even changed the file for the last slide, in case it was corrupt or something like that, but nothing worked permanently.

[guns1inger]

Which version of DLP are you using ? I note in the changelog at Mediachance that there were some issues with some early versions of DLP 2.x. Fixes went into 2.18

FWIW, I stopped using DLP's slideshow functions back around 1.3 when I had problems with broken audio on some players (notably Philips players, although Pioneers worked fine). I do most of mine in Vegas by hand, although for quick slideshows I like Microsoft Photostory and save using Papa John's encoding templates (papajohn.org)

[ADigitalMan]

An interesting thing fixed this. I went to recode the film in Nero to fit it onto a single-layer disc. There were six vobs in the titleset. Curiously, Nero failed to recode as it said it couldn't find VTS_01_07 (which doesn't exist). So I made a copy of the slideshow using my trusty ol' copy of DVDFab, and renamed the single VOB to VTS_01_07. I placed this in the otherwise-untouched original folder and voila ... no crashing and a successful recode. The new VTS doesn't even do anything, but clearly something in the authoring phase made it think such a VOB was supposed to be there.

Granted this doesn't really address the root of the problem, but it did fix it.

I'm using DLP v 1.53 build 050530, for the record. I should look into upgrading. I would usually use Vegas myself, but I've found that makes for a larger file and I didn't want to devote much space to this slideshow, as on this disc it's just a bonus feature. I'd rather dedicate as much space as possible to the main movie.

[guns1inger]

At the very least take the free upgrade to 1.6. As for file sizes from Vegas - that is completely under your control. File size is a function of running time x bitrate. You know how long your slideshow is on the timeline, so use this to get the correct bitrate to feed the encoder in Vegas.