Playback Issues

[HRMaddie]

I have finally started capturing home movies from my Sony TRV18 and transfering them to a DVD to send to family members. I am experiencing some random blockiness during playback on an old standalone Sony DVD player. If I go back to the exact same spot during playback the blockiness doesn't occur, it is completely random. Usually just occurs at the beginning of a movie and not the same one.

I used VideoStudio 8 for capturing and minor editing. I saved as AVI with VS8. I used TMPGEnc Source Creator to encode to MPEGII. I used the bitrate calculator to derive the proper bitrate. Typically the rate was around 9400. Most of my home movies are around five minutes.

I then authored with TMPEnc Author 1.6 and burned using 1.6, too. I am buring to Verbatim Data Life Plus -R, 4x with a Plextor 708A.

I started thinking maybe I was using too high of a bitrate when encoding or that the DVD player is going bad. The Sony going bad is my first choice. I am going to send a couple to family members to see if they experience the same issue.

Essentially I am wondering am I following the proper steps? Am I missing something? Is the bitrate too high?

[sacajaweeda]

My Sony DVP-NS325 just gave up the ghost after about a year of heavy use. It would start playing DVDs just fine then after a few minutes the screen would turn into a big colorful rainbow collage of little colored tiles of motion. Back to using my old Samsung DVD-M101 player until I buy a new one.

[monzie]

That bitrate is EXTREMELY high for DVD if its the average, and I would guess that your DVD player cannot read the information of the disk fast enough to keep up (like how SVCD's encoded at too high a rate have the same problem on some players).

Maybe trying another media MAY help but I would definately try lowering the bitate to something like around 6000 ave and see if the problem still occurs.

[HRMaddie]

I lowered the bitrate during the conversion. I let TMPGEnc Source Creator do it automatically. So far no problems during playback. Thanks for the input.

[monzie]

Your welcome.