authored DVD freezing...but individual VOBs play fine

[Massa]

Long story short I had a miniDVD corrupted and recovered it with ISOPuzzle.
The material recovered 95% after 15 hours and I extracted the VOBs with ISOBuster.
After going through VTSFIX I authored a DVD.
The result: it plays for 10-15 seconds and freezes forever, it happens with all the 3 titles (VOBs)in the DVD, both playing on stand alone DVD players or my PC.
When I select and play each individual VOB in my PC, they play "fine"....some glitters and small freezes (but recovers)
I have already demux/mux, no help.
Only thing I haven't done is reencode. If that is the solution, how should I set the parameters (bit rate, deinterlace or not, etc).
Thanks

[Baldrick]

If you try reconvert then use highest possible bitrate so it fits on a DVDR(max around 8 MBit/s), don't deinterlace and use same settings for everything else(resolution,frame rate).

[Massa]

Thanks a lot.
What encoder would you recommend?
Do you believe reencoding will solve the freezing problem?

[tomlee59]

Re-encoding would help if it successfully finishes the job. However, you might find that the process halts at those glitchy points. If so, here are things to try:

1) Fix timecode breaks. You can use MPEG Streamclip to do this. It's free, but you'll need the MPEG2 component as well. On the Mac side, at least, it is not free.
2) Edit the clip. Cut out the glitchy parts. When you re-save the edited result, the timecode problem should automatically disappear.

You may find, depending on the nature of the original file damage, that you end up with a playable result with audio sync problems. That will require manually editing the audio file to resync things (e.g., use Audacity).

Good luck!

[MysticE]

You could load the VOBs into DVDFlick as a quick test and see if it hangs or completes.

[Massa]

DVD Flick solved it.
But what ( free) encoder do you recommend for doing it as high quality as possible?
Thanks

[MysticE]

Most would say HCenc 2 pass. But you didn't specify the running time, although 3 VOBs sounds short. With a short running and a high bitrate there may not be any real advantage to 2 pass encoding with HCenc which shines on longer run times when bitrates in the 4k (or less) range are needed.

You can figure the bitrate based on running time needed here:

https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

There a few free front ends that use HCenc. I like this app:

http://avstodvd.googlepages.com/home

Do note you'll probably have to untick Keep Compliant Video, find and tell it to use HCenc, as on short running times/high bitrates it defaults to QUenc.

[Massa]

I tried Quenc from DVDFORGER but despite setting bit rate to 7000 the final file has 3500.
Is that a problem of Quenc?
I set 1 pass, hi-quality , trellis enabled and target bit rate 7000...

[MysticE]

What's your running time? How did the final result look?

Sounds like about an hour. If so try it at 8500 kb/s bitrate.