DVD authored so badly, that backup apps choke on it.

[DeadLily]

I've encountered a real curiosity - a DVD that's so horribly authored that MTR doesn't even try to do anything with it, and myDVDedit crashes when trying to open it. And yet, it has no encryption at all; the VIDEO_TS folder can be dragged straight to the hard drive and it plays just fine from there.

It's a double feature flipper disk with Highway Hitcher and Stir (real lowgrade stuff here). It's the Stir side with the odd symptoms. With the disk in the drive, the desktop icon is named "LOGICAL VOLUME IDENTIFIER", and MTR simply names it "VOLUME IDENTIFIER". Even if I drag its folder to the drive, myDVDedit crashes if I try to examine it. MTR sits idle if I press "GO!"; doesn't even budge (though maybe that's what it does when a disk has no encryption).

Anyway, this authoring job is a doozy. Apparantly it was captured from a 2-hour BetaSP tape. There's all sorts of analog noise and glitches. The movie is 90 minutes, and after it ends, the screen goes white and stays that way for 30 more minutes. At the very end, you can see the Beta deck stop and rewind the tape. In other words, 25% of the disk's capacity is wasted on blank tape. Whoever was capturing it wasn't even watching. And the distorted sound can't decide if it's stereo or all in the left channel. No menus, no extras, just a single movie track with the FBI warning and distributor logos scotch-taped to the beginning.

[Spoffo]

If you can get a playable VIDEO_TS on your hard disk with just a finder copy, what would you need MTR for? Can't you just drag the first VOB of the main title to Toast in video mode and let Toast create a disk with a new, playable menu/directory?

[thoughton]

I think DeadLily was just sharing with us, rather than asking any questions

[terryj]

I've encountered a real curiosity-
Anyway, this authoring job is a doozy. Apparantly it was captured from a 2-hour BetaSP tape. There's all sorts of analog noise and glitches. The movie is 90 minutes, and after it ends, the screen goes white and stays that way for 30 more minutes. At the very end, you can see the Beta deck stop and rewind the tape. In other words, 25% of the disk's capacity is wasted on blank tape. Whoever was capturing it wasn't even watching. And the distorted sound can't decide if it's stereo or all in the left channel. No menus, no extras, just a single movie track with the FBI warning and distributor logos scotch-taped to the beginning.

Dead,
I think I've seen these flippers at SunCoast...these are the ones
where it's 2 movies on one disc, using the old movie
posters as cover art? Usually priced at $4 to $6 or so?

If so, that sucks....They had a couple of Paul Naschy movies
I was wanting to get, to replace my oh so long ago recorded
VHS tapes. I'd at least like menus, even if there's no extras...

[DeadLily]

Yeah, no problems or questions, I'm just amazed how thoughtless this authoring job was. I was hoping myDVDedit would give me some clue as to how it was made, but I'm not losing sleep over it. Frankly, I would prefer that ALL DVDs just play the movie when I put it in the player, and go to the menu when it's finished or if I press the Menu button.

This one was at least encoded VBR, but even the 30 minutes of white were rated pretty high. Both of these films were direct-to-video, Stir being a Traci Lords "thriller".

[Frobozz]

This very much sounds like a DVD that was encoded and authored by a Pioneer standalone DVD recorder (or perhaps other brand). They have the Logical Volume Identifier name and myDVDedit crashes when you try to open them. They also are filled with time code breaks about every 40 seconds according the MPEG Streamclip. Toast 7's Media Browser shows each of those breaks as a chapter until the 99-chapter limit is reached. Also, using Streamclip's time code break repair doesn't actually repair these reported breaks.

This problem only happens when a video-mode DVD is recorded in real time with the Pioneer standalone recorder. Doing a high-speed copy from the recorder's hard drive to a DVD or recording a VR-mode DVD-RW doesn't have this problem.