Hollywood DVDs

[Jonma Tifa]

I'm running some tests on some DVD players and have attempted to author my own DVD for this purpose. But the DVD I made doesn't seem to behave in the same way as most hollywood DVDs. What are some of the key characteristics of most hollywood DVDs?

Also, my test was authored at 23.976 FPS with a telecine (3:2 pulldown) flag, but many resources I have consulted with say that you may only author at either 29.97 or 25 fps (NTSC/PAL), even though the disk played back fine. Does having the telecine flag "count" as being 29.97? The only problem I experenced doing it this way was the time counter on the front of the player didn't count time properly, the playback was fine, 1 second of video = 1 second of playback, but the playback timer was a little slow. (obviously counting 30 frames as one second, rather than 24 as a second)

[adam]

NTSC video must be played back at 29.97fps, that's all. The DVD standard supports 29.97fps or 23.976fps(internally 29.97fps). The vast majority of commercial NTSC DVDs are encoded at 23.976fps with 3:2 pulldown flags enabled. The counter should be correct. If its off then your DVD isn't compliant or your player is defective.

If you haven't already, try using pulldown.exe to add your pulldown flags. I personally don't trust most encoders to do it for me.

[Jonma Tifa]

If its off then your DVD isn't compliant or your player is defective.

Well, that's the thing, the player I'm testing on, the counter works just fine on comercial DVDs (I went through with the frame advance button, one frame at a time and counted 24 before the counter advanced 1 second.)

I was using IFOedit before to create a very simple DVD layout, and apparently there's some sort of bug associated with something similar to this.

[adam]

I don't know if this is a specific bug attributable to IFOEdit, but I do know that IFOEdit created DVDs are non-compliant in multiple ways.

[Jonma Tifa]

Which authoring tool would you recommend for building a fully compliant DVD?

[adam]

I honestly couldn't recommend a totally compliant application that would come at any kind of reasonable price. I believe BJ_M (who has access to some wonderful toys) tested compatibility with TMPGenc DVD Author and, though there were some compliancy issues, the output was fairly close to spec. DVD Lab is probably a decent choice too.

Basically anything other then IFOEdit really. Its authoring capabilities are barebones and not fully developed.