NVE seems to be picky about the files it uses.....

[postformac]

Ok, first off I am new to this forum so be gentle and yada yada, I have tried to search for answers to the things I am going to ask but A: I am not really sure what to search for and B: In the searches I have done I haven't found anything relevant so I'm sorry if this has already been answered somewhere else (and I'm afraid this is going to be a long post to properly explain my problem) but I'm going to ask it (again?) anyway in the hope that one of you experts can help me.......

I am using NVE3 (v3.1.0.0) and my operating system is WXP SP1, 1ghz Centrino processor on a Sony Vaio PCG-TR3A laptop that I bought in the US (its actually faster than my supposed 2.7ghz desktop but I digress.....) no idea what the video card etc is but I'm sure I can find out if anyone thinks it will make any difference to my specific problem.

I'm not a newbie as such but certainly wouldn't describe myself as any kind of expert, I have been into transcoding and burning lots of different file types into DVD format for about 2 years now but there's lots that I don't know and I freely admit to learning all the time

I have a large number of downloaded *.avi and *.mpg files that I regulary burn into DVD format using NVE3, mostly music videos etc that come from various sources. For the record I think NVE is an easy to use and useful bit of software, I have heard various complains about it on this and other forums and yes it does have its limitations but hey it works well enough for me. Err, most of the time, otherwise I wouldn't be posting.....

To give an example of my problem, say I have 6 *.avi files, I import them into NVE, make a menu & chapters etc, transcode them (which takes about 3 - 3 1/2 hours) and then burn the finished files to a DVD, no reported problems during the encoding or the burning. 9 times out of 10 the finished product works perfectly but occasionaly I get a problem where the menu works fine but the first chapter will not play at all (crashes my stand-alone DVD player, I have to power off and on again) and every subsequent chapter plays ok but I cannot rewind / forwardwind properly, its as though the DVD is badly burnt. I have tried re-burning a few times at 1x speed with no difference and I have tried re-encoding the saved project more than once and reburning multiple times but again no difference. Then I remove the first chapter (the one that will not play and crashes my player) and replace it with a different *.avi, the project will encode perfectly and the finished files will burn perfectly just as before but suddenly the end DVD plays every chapter and will RW/FW exactly as it should, it's as though specific files have the ability to corrupt the entire disk and as long as I leave them out all the other files work perfectly.

I don't know what the difference in files is and have no way of telling which files will "corrupt" a finished DVD without trying it first (lengthy process) but it always seems to be the file used as the first chapter that causes the fault. I hope you understand the problem that I am trying to describe and I hope (more!) that someone has an answer for me, I welcome any suggestions or comments that I recieve!

[jimmalenko]

The only thing you could do is analyse each AVI that causes problems as well as a couple that work fine with GSpot or AVICodec and see if you can find a common reason why all those AVIs cause problems, whereas others do not. Straight off the top, it could be choking on the frame rate, or the audio type, or maybe the codec it uses to decompress either the video and/or the audio is corrupted, ...... and there's probably a heap more possibilities.

On top of all that, it just might be a bug in NVE ...

[postformac]

jimmalenko, thanks for the reply. I tried the two programs that you suggested but can't see any difference between the AVI files, all have exactly the same frame rate, size etc so still not sure what would cause the problems I have been having.

I have found something interesting with the mpg files that I have though, I decided to try using TMPGEnc as an alternative to Nero and found that out of 25 files that I was trying to build into a DVD it rejected 15 of them with various problems reported such as wrong frame rate, wrong size ratio and incorrect or missing GOP header file (not sure what that is?). This could well explain some of the problems that I have had with the mpg files I have been using in NVE.

Is there any way that you know of for me to re-encode these files to correct these problems?

Thanks

[mats.hogberg]

Is there any way that you know of for me to re-encode these files to correct these problems?

You answered your question yourself (in the same sentence!) You have to re-encode them to meet the DVD specs. This is most easily done using one of the DVD templates with TMPGEnc (Not TMPGEnc DVD Author, which comes in use after you have your source files properly setup).

/Mats