Ulead WS2 Express Play All Not Working

[rrstudio2]

I have 5 video titles (seperate MPEG files) on one disk and I want these to all play back without returning to any menus. This should be easy using the play all in Ulead Workshop 2 Express, however for some reason I am not getting results I want consistly. At the end of each title, it goes to the next one except for the transition between titles 3 and 4. It seems like ~99% of the time title 3 finishes and then it returns to the main menu. Title 3 is a MPEG file encoded by TMPGenc with MPEG audio, however I am having WS2 express convert the audio into AC3 since the rest of the audio on the DVD is AC3. Title 4 is a MPEG file encoded by Premiere elements v2 with AC3 audio. Title 4 is also the only title that has chapters. Title 3 does have a higher bit rate than title 4. I have also tried building a play list that goes thru all the titles as opposed to the Play all option, but I get the same results. Any ideas why it is reverting to the main menu? Do disk do this sometimes if there is an error or something wrong with the encoding of the MPEG file? As another hint, so far (twice) it seems to play back in my computer DVD player which makes me think there is some error the stand alones can't handle. Anyway I can check for errors? It has happened on two copies of the DVD so I don't think it is a burning issue.

I have run into this type of problem sporadically and am not sure what I am doing that causes it. If I want a DVD to play back everything, is it generally safer to make it all one MPEG file with different chapters? In my experience it seems like some stand alone DVD players have problems with playing multiple MPEG files back to back. Does anyone else have this issue and more importantly, what can I do to fix it? Do I end up with these issues because I am using different encoders (TMPGenc vs Premiere elements) to encode the video?

Thanks,
Andrew V. Romero

[lordsmurf]

Is your playlist set up correctly?

[rrstudio2]

Yes, the playlist are not hard to setup. It goes from title 1 to title 2 to title 3 to title 4 to title 5. I also am getting the same results from making a button and assigning Ulead's play all command. Any ideas what is going on?

-Andrew

[GeorgeW]

You'll certainly get your results if you combine them all into one long title (note, you will lose the ability to play just a single Title and return to the main menu).

My guess is you have multiple VTS's on your dvd because of all the different formats you are using. Perhaps resolution or bitrate or something is different enough that DWS is creating multiple VTS's -- look in your VIDEO_TS folder, list the file names you see...

Regards

[lordsmurf]

Multi VTS should not affect continuous playlist.

However, it needs to be noted that some DVD players vomit on playlists. My Toshiba does this, but it's the only player I've seen to date that ignored the playlist I set.

[GeorgeW]

Agreed, I didn't mean to imply multi VTS's are a problem (because I do them all the time). I was just speculating that DWS is having a problem handling the jumping properly...

[rrstudio2]

When I get home I will check on the multiple VSTs however since they are different files encoded with different encoders at different bitrates, shouldn't they have different VSTs? I was under the impression that different VSTs just meant you had different files on the DVD.

As another test I tried re-encoding the audio for title 4 (the DV title) using the workshop express 2 which means that I had workshop express encode all of the audio files on the DVD. This seems to improve the continuous playback from title 3 to title 4, but it still has issues sometimes and reverts to the main menu. The DVD player seems like it is searching at the end of title 3 for where to go. It pauses for a second and makes some sound. Then if for some reason it can't pick up title 4 it reverts to the main menu.

The reason I don't really want to encode the entire DVD with one
encoder is that my titles 1-3 and 5 are photo slide shows and the
quality of the MPEGs from TMPGenc are noticably higher than the quality
I can get using say Premiere elements encoder. Title 4 is video from a
camcorder and for some reason I can not seem to get TMPGenc to encode DV from my camcorder. The quality turns out really poor when I encode my DV with TMPGenc (yes I have tried following several guides and have posted several questions, none of which have resulted in decent
results). There must be some slight imcompatibility with my system and however TMPGenc imports or processes the DV-AVI files.


Does anyone else have issues playing back multiple titles continuously
when the titles were encoded by different encoders?

Thanks for the ideas,
Andrew V. Romero

[GeorgeW]

it was my bad for not finishing my thought -- the multi-vts's isn't necessarily a problem. I was just thinking that DWS might be having a problem setting up the proper playlist with the multi-vts' (I don't know that for sure).

But can you determine if your first 3 videos are in one VTS, and the remaining are in another?

Open up the dvd with PGCEdit, and you might be able to debug the playback flow...

George

[rrstudio2]

So I looked at the video_TS folder of the DVD. The following files are there
Video_TS.BUP
VTS_01_0.BUP
Video_TS.IFO
VTS_01_0.IFO
Video_TS.VOB
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB
VTS_01_3.VOB
VTS_01_4.VOB

Again, there were 5 files I used to make this DVD. It also seems odd that if I play the VOB files, the first one starts at the beginning of the first file. The second starts playing half way thru the 3 file, and goes thru most of the way thru the 4th file. So VTS_01_2.VOB contains both files 3 and 4 which are the ones having issues playing back to back. I am not familiar with DVD structures, but it seems like each file would be its own VOB. Is there anything strange in that structure above?

Any other ideas?

-Andrew V. Romero