I bought a camcorder with an AV->DV converter, a firewire card, and Pinnacle Studio 8.4. I've had no problems capturing video & audio onto my hard drive (it always chooses AVI format). When I play back the AVI files through Windows' media player, they look and sound great throughout.

In my first editing project in Pinnacle, I took 2 AVI files and dropped each AVI into several "slots" and edited each slot to have the proper start and stop time from for each chapter. I added a menu at the front with links to each chapter. I previewed what I had done on the computer and it played perfectly like 1 big movie with chapters.

Next I selected "automatic" mode to encode to DVD (MPEG2) using PCM audio. After many hours of encoding, I tried the resulting VOB files in PowerDVD from the hard drive -- they played perfectly and I could skip to each chapter as I wanted. At the end of the last chapter it returned to the menu silently.

Now the mystery begins. I burned these files in the VIDEO_TS directory (minus the anchor and volume files) in Nero which I have successfully used for all my other DVD burning. Then I played the resulting DVD-R in a few players. Everything seemed fine for the first several chapters, but as I got further out the audio started stuttering severely at certain spots with occasional crackles throughout. I went back to check these spots on the generated VOB files played through PowerDVD and there were no problems. I figured my player was going out of alignment toward the edge of the disc, so I tried a different one and got similar stuttering, but not at precisely the same points. I finally tried a different brand of DVD burned at a different speed and the same type of audio stuttering problem occurred on each player.

I am stumped why files that play fine on my hard drive through PowerDVD have audio stuttering problems when burned on different DVD-Rs and played on different players. Does anyone know why this might be happening and how to fix this? For instance, is it a known encoding bug in version 8.4 and downloading the latest patch will solve it? Should I have selected 12-bit instead of 16-bit audio capture on my camcorder?

Since other DVDs written by the same Nero version on the same writer have no problems on any player, I believe this is something specific to Pinnacle Studio and perhaps using "LPCM" audio which I've never done before.

For comparison, are there any freeware tools that can take the same AVI files, allow me to set start and stop points, and encode them into a set of VOB files ready to be burned by Nero?

A few other things I noticed:

- Pinnacle Studio generates VOBs which are a bit smaller than the traditional 1 GB files other tools like DVD Shrink generate. I assume this is not relevant to my problem? Is there a way to change this in Pinnacle?
- At the very end of my burned DVD (the end of the last chapter) when the player is about to return to my menu, there is a loud noise which sounds like a half-second of audio captured from somewhere else. Yet when I preview the end of the chapter in Pinnacle Studio or play the generated VOB files from the hard drive, I do not hear this sound. Any ideas on this?
- Pinnacle Studio's "automatic" mode generates files totaling about 250 MB less than what I'm used to with DVD Shrink (4,681,xxx,xxx bytes). Is there a reason for this and can I make automatic mode use more space?

Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.