Strange Apex behavior or...

[vivisimonvi]

I've been recently making homemade DVD videos ranging from home movies, recorded TV shows, and concert recordings. Has anyone noticed this strange behavior with any of their DVD or software players.

On some of my concert recordings where the lighting is practically pitch black... the lighting will come back on but the player will freeze at a certain frame for a few seconds before it resumes again (it seems to play any stream fine if there's plenty of lighting). I've owned an Apex 5131 for over a year and this is the first time I've seen my player do this specifically with these types of recordings where there's a lot of black areas in the video. I've used different authoring and burning programs, but the results are the same (I've tried different media as well ranging from TDK, Optodisc, and Riteks)

I used to think it was my capture techniques but it doesn't seem likely, I haven't noticed this on my other DVD players like my Samsung, it seems to play the DVD flawless.

Could this have anything to do with the bitrate? I noticed using PowerDVD the information panel will sometimes read the bitrate as low as .5 Mbps... and it'll start skipping (even on the harddrive). My ATI DVD player reads the disc fine!! The only thing I haven't changed is my encoding techniques, I use the TMPGEnc DVD templates and don't really change anything.

These are the steps I use:

VirtualDUB - Capture (Huffyuv)
TMPGEnc - Encode CBR 8000 352X480 Video + 384 Audio
Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2 - Author + Burn

[lordsmurf]

Could be bad GOP length .... an encode error I'd bet ... must share ALL the settings ... and version #

[vivisimonvi]

TMPGEnc Plus 2.510

Res: 352X480
Bitrate: CBR 8000 (384 Audio)
YUV Format: 10 Bits
Motion Search Precision: Highest Quality

IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBP Sequence (Closed GOP)
Detect Scene Change ON
No motion search for still picture OFF

Everything else was left alone using the DVD Wizard template

[vivisimonvi]

Is there a way to check for these types of errors somehow?

As I said before this only happens to my VHS sources that are very DARK. My Apex standalone player and PowerDVD complain about the final DVD video. Where as, My ATI DVD player and Samsung standalone read it just fine.

[vivisimonvi]

I think I've solved the problem. It seems using too much bitrate for scenes not needing even half of it causes problems.

I initially wanted MAXIMUM quality so I set an 8000 (CBR) video bitrate for the entire video.

This time I've used 2-pass VBR (I set it 6000 average but it only averaged a 4000 video bitrate). A lot of parts had a bitrate as low as 100 on really dark portions of the video. It cut the entire movie in half in terms of size but it's playing fine now on all players.

I've concluded CBR isn't a reliable DVD standard depending on what source you're using.