Jumpy DVDs

[Isaacjay]

I've recently got a Pioneer 106-DVR burner.

The films I have burnt have not been perfect. When playing the image and sound stops and jumps a few seconds. I've tried playing the discs in different DVD players but the same thing happens at the same places.

I compliled the DVD from an MPEG2 file using DVD-LAB.

The MPEG2 file seems to play ok on the computer.
I'm burning to DVD-Rs.

What is this most likely causing the problem?
...The hardware?
...The DVD-R's?
...The authoring software?


thanks.

[WuphonsReach]

If it's towards the end of the disc, I'd say you have a media problem.

If elsewhere on the disc, you might have got a flaky burn when you created the disc (e.g. running the buffer down to 0% during a burn). Try re-burning the disc to a new piece of media (different brand if possible).

Stopping/stuttering on a set-top player indicates that it's having difficulty reading or handling what's coming off the disc. (Bad sectors, too much data due to too high of a bitrate, etc.)

[Isaacjay]

Thanks for replying, that was very helpful.

How do I determine what the appropiate bitrate should be? So far I've been converting the AVI files to MPEG2 using the standard settings.

[WuphonsReach]

The upper-end for DVD bitrates is around 9800kbps, which includes room for both the video stream and the audio stream.

The problem that can arise is if you use uncompressed PCM audio (1536kbps) on top of a high bitrate, e.g. 8000. Combined, that adds up to 9536kbps which is close to the limit of the spec. Especially if the video stream occasionally rises above 8000kbps.

Switching to AC3 (only 256kbps or so) audio will alleviate this issue because the player only has to deal with roughly 8256kbps (well below the cap).

Odds are, if you're recording 2 hours worth of content on the disc, your video rate is nowhere near 8000kbps (probably using a video rate of 4500-5500?).

As to what bitrates you need to use to fit a specified length onto the DVD... look for a bitrate calculator (probably under the Tools menu on the left?). Full-size D1 (720x480, 720x576, 704x480, 704x576) should probably not use bitrates below 4000kbps, but filtering of the source or tweaking the MPEG2 encoding step can help. Half-D1 (352x480, 352x576) requires roughly half the bitrate as full-size to get the same quality.