DRU 500 AX made DVD with ghost image on the screen....

[sellpipe]

I finally attempted to make my first DVD tonite and when I play it in the same drive I get no color except for a complete ghost image of the screen just slightly below the image. The ghost image is in pink. the sound is ok.

ALSO at the very bottom of the screen there are two smaller images side-by-side of the movie that are maybe 20% of the total height of my monitor tall (I swear to you I am on no drugs!!)

I captured the home movie thru my Sony TRV 50 camcorder That I used as a pass thru from a hi8 camera with the original home movie playing on it. I captured it to my comp using firewire to a separate drive used only for storage. I used Scenealyzer to capture it in AVI. (The AVI file played fine on its own.) I used virtualdub to trim the ends of the movie and then encoded to MPEG2 using CCE SP (The MPEG2 movie played fine on its own too) I tryed to use MYDVD that came with the drive to burn the movie but I kept getting a "overrun/underun Error" I dont know which is was (over or under) So I used NEODVD Plus 4 to burn it and it burned fine with no errors (At least until I played the DVD that is)

My system is Win XP pro, 1.1 gig t-bird process, 128 meg ram, All programs installed on 30gig hard drive, all storage is on separate 80 gig hard drive (No progs installed on it at all) My DRU 500AX is 2.0c So I dont know if the firmware is the problem or what.

The blank media I used was the Sony DVD+RW that came with my drive.

Does anyone have an idea what might cause my problem?? Just let me know if you need more info from me and I will let you know.

Thanks a bunch!!

[sellpipe]

I am at work now, so I cant check it out personally. Does NeoDVD have a place to let it know if you are using -R, -RW, +R or +RW??

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out my problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Doug

[mkelley]

What happens when you play this DVD on a standalone?

I'm not sure I have a whole lot of help for you -- my Sony works perfectly. However, there is certainly one thing I'd try and that is to use DVDLab. Besides it being the best DVD authoring program out there (well, the best in terms of price/ratio :>) it was the only one that did everything I wanted to do with my Sony (including burning -- I had issues with three other programs I tried).

Right now there's a free beta here:

http://www.mmbforums.com/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi?s=c6999f71921db0c3b33bbfee169c8a...=28;t=135;st=0

but note this may change as days go on (it's really close to final release). If nothing more you might get hooked on this great program.

[sellpipe]

I have a Panasonic stand-alone and it gave me an error message saying wrong type of disc inserted.

I will try the software you mention and see what its like

I just hope i can figure out whats wrong.....

[sellpipe]

I hope you have better luck than I did with Sony Tech support. They have a bunch of idiots manning the phones there. I could swear the guy i talked wit was reading from que cards.

30 minutes on the phone and accomplished NADDA!!! He just wanted to change a few settings and that was it.....

I still have the same problems.....

[mkelley]

Tech Support is a problem with all hardware and software nowadays -- companies face lean times and it's always the first place they cut.

Did they have you at least get the latest firmware? At the very least I would try this first, as I notice now you are using 2c. That was the first thing I did before I even burned disk 1 on my Sony and I've had zero problems since (dozens of disks without a coaster, of all brands of media).

It also worries me what you are trying won't burn using the default programs. I think I'd try another test, perhaps a real short (two or three minute) video just to see it you can get things straightened out. As I noted earlier, I've been using DVDLab to burn all my stuff without problems, so I for sure would give this a try (but RecordNow or Nero should work just fine as well).

Finally I would consider trying some DVD-R media. I understand you wanting to get things worked out first on the rewritables, and that may be best, but quite frankly I've never used it (not even the one that comes with the Sony). At the very least doing this ought to give you a disk you can play on your desktop and then you can see if the same problems persist there.