Method to burn DVDs compatible with most players

[bgrant]

After lots of experimentation, downloading trials, buying different brand discs, and carrying burns to different friends' houses, I think I've finally come up with a process that allows me to author and burn nice looking DVDRs that will play in most DVD players.

Here's the steps:

1. I capture and edit from a DV camcorder with Pinnacle Studio 8. This is where I add all transitions and effects. I then save the movie to a DV-AVI file (which will be large.)

2. I use TMPGEnc to render the AVI file to DVD-MPEG2 using the standard template.

3. Finally, I use Ulead's DVD Workshop to author the movie, adding chapter points, menus, background music, etc. I then create DVD video folders with Ulead to my hard disk for making multiple copies later.

4. To burn, I still use Ulead DVD Workshop. I tell it to burn a disc image from a video folder to my Sony DRX500UL. I've had great success with either Apple DVD-R or Imation DVD-R from Office Depot.

These discs not only look fantastic, but the process is fairly simple and suprisingly fast (on a 2.2GHz P4). Most importantly, they have played on every player I've tried, unlike the same movie still authored with DVDWS but burned with Nero 5.5.10.

For some reason, DVDRs burned with Nero won't play in my parent's GE 1105P DVD player, but the ones burned with Ulead do. I've tried all settings in Nero, from DVD Video to DVD UDF to DVD UDF/ISO, both including and not including XBox compatibility.

I hope these steps help others who may be struggling to find a consistent process to make discs you're confident to give to others. And if anyone has ANY idea what is different between the Nero burns and DVDWS burns, please feel free to share.

[JasonK]

You can also do all the authoring, encoding, and burning right in Studio 8. I know some people using it, and they have tried their disks in a lot of DVD players without problems. No use making it more complicated.

For Nero, try UDF/IOS, ISO9660, deselect Joliet and any iso relax extensions, click on UDF tab and select physical and 1.02. You should have much better luck that way.

RecordNow Max has been the solution for a lot of users trying to get compatible playback. There's almost nothing to configure, although you should make sure the option for video_ts is selected and close disc is selected.

[bgrant]

I tried doing it all with Pinnacle but never once got it to get past "Compiling Disc." I had all the menus and chapters laid out, it rendered (which was noticably lower quality than with TMPGEnc), then it would crash with an Application Error while compiling disc - even after upgrading to 8.3.

I've tried Nero with the settings you mention as well as RecordMax which came with the Sony. Neither one produced as good as compatibility results in my testing than Ulead DVD Workshop did.

[ktnwin]

bgrant,

you did not have much luck with Studio 8 then. I tried to make a DVD with Studio 8 and it worked right the first time. That's the only tool I use to create DVD at this time (only two weeks in DVD burning so far).

Studio 8 is kind of weird, the user must feel what NOT TO DO or else it will crash !!! I did crash it a few times and know what to avoid.