A Universally Playable DVD

[DorianDW]

Is it possible to create a DVD that can be played unquestionably on every DVD player like the commercially produced ones you would buy in a store?

Dorian

[harley2ride]

Not from a dvd burner on your pc. Play on most players yes, but never all. You can burn your dvd region free and -rom to get maximum compatibility, but then you have pal vs ntsc, and other problems that can crop up.

[DorianDW]

Is it possible to find a service that makes disks like commercially produced disks? Or, is this only a practicle option if you want to do a massive production?

[TooLFooL]

yeah it's possible, that's how the pro's do it!

[DorianDW]

Right, but the pros produce a massive number of disks. I would only want a few hundred.

Dorian

[canadateck]

http://www.nationwidecd.com/dvd.html

[Cornucopia]

Think of it this way: If all you want is 100 instead of 1000, you can easily replicate (DVD-5) with a DVD-Recordable master and supplied artwork. It'll just cost $12.50 per disc, as opposed to $1.25 per disc!
What will actually be happening, is they will run their presses like normal, creating 1000 discs, then either they will throw away 900 of them and ship you 100 or they will ship you all 1000 and you will throw away the 900. At first it makes sense to get the 1000, but the former may be better if you don't want to have to pay for that extra shipping and you KNOW you won't ever need that many.

Scott

[DorianDW]

Would those disks then be compatible with players that can't play regular home burned DVD-Rs?

Could this be done with DVD-R DL too?

Dorian

[spectroelectro]

You can't.
You can get pretty good compatibility by using either WAV or AC3 (N*O*T mpa ) as your audio track and by encoding with a good solid mpeg-2 encoder like ProCoder or TMPGenc or Mainconcept or CCE, using a solid lower bound bitrate like 2000 and a conservative upper bitrate of no more than 8000. Keep your total video + audio data < 3900 megs, A*V*O*I*D authoring with garbageware like DVDLab which is known to produce DVDs which are not completely compatible with the DVD spec (Ulead Video Workshop 2 or DVD Maestro or SpruceUp are the best DVD authoring apps for general compatibility) and always burn with RecordNow or VSO, never Nero or Roxio or other junkware. If you do that, you'll get DVDs that play on most standalone DVD players. That's as good as you can get. No DVD you burn on your computer will ever play on ALL standalone players because some standalone players don't like DVD-R media, even in this day and age.

[guns1inger]

A*V*O*I*D authoring with garbageware like DVDLab which is known to produce DVDs which are not completely compatible with the DVD spec

Again with this unsubstantiated bollocks. Either put up, or stop the crap. Where is your proof ?

[lordsmurf]

DVD-Lab does make slightly out of spec discs, and it has other bugs. Reports abound net-wide.

[guns1inger]

In what way. Aside from the fact that is has an option to allow the creation of out of spec disks on request, what are the issues and where are they documented ?

I am not trying to be difficult, and just blindly defending a product that I like, but am genuinely curious as to what the problems are. Especially because I have yet to have any playback problems across a wide variety of devices.

[lordsmurf]

I don't remember offhand, it's been a while, a year maybe. Suffice to say, discs didn't work when they should have. I think it was something to do with how IFO's and menus were made, but I just don't recall. It was discussed on this forum a little bit, and I saw a detailed explanation of it somewhere before too (it may have even been personal correspondence to me of some sort).

Anyway, let's not threadjack too much.

To answer the question from the original poster, no. Author to fully compliant DVD-Video specs, and then press a disc. But even then, hardware varies, even a press doesn't get 100% perfect results. But it'll be in the high 98-99% area.

Much like dye materials can vary, pressing material can vary. Those cheap crap $1 discs from Walmart are not made the same as the $22 big budget releases.

[Shadowmistress]

A*V*O*I*D authoring with garbageware like DVDLab which is known to produce DVDs which are not completely compatible with the DVD spec

Oh no, he did not just say that!
<me, takes off earings and high heels in preparation>

I am not trying to be difficult, and just blindly defending a product that I like

I have no problem blindly defending products I like.

I don't remember offhand, it's been a while, a year maybe.

Two points. Can you positively say there was no user error involved in those "problems" you heard of? Remember that it's not TDA we're talking about here and the learning curve is higher. And was it the first incarnation of dvdlab or the pro version?

I absolutely hate baseless rumours that have no facts backing them.

[lordsmurf]

Yes, user error was eliminated. The problem existed in the beta of the pro version.

Again, let's not threadjack.

Although it does make a good point that a "universally playabla DVD" does indeed need to have anal retentive following of the DVD spec. Some software doesn't do that. Or let's you ignore proper specs.

[Shadowmistress]

Dvdlab doesn't "let" you go out of specs either unless you go into its environmental settings and manually change them. By default, it's just as strict as any other software. If someone is that much of a newb that they don't know what proper dvd specs are, what are they doing messing with dvdlab settings?

Saying dvdlab is a bad app because of it's flexibility is like saying anything that is not an all-in-one app sucks. If you don't know what you're doing, then don't bother using it.

And yes, let's not threadjack any further. :P

[Cornucopia]

Which authoring app you use is tangential to the question. I could use Scenarist, the King of pro DVD authoring apps, and still wouldn't get the best compatibility if I output to a burned disc.

You want the best compatibility? You make pressed discs.

Next in line is DVD-R (Authoring) discs (using the $$$$$ Pioneer S-101 or S-201 drives only), particularly the 3.95GB size.

Below that is all the rest, including modified booktype versions.

Scott