Occasional D.O.A. slideshows made with Proshow Gold

[Seeker47]

I'm trying to help out a user of Proshow Gold, who has used this program a lot (mostly successfully), although she is very unsophisticated re most hardware or software issues overall. I myself have almost no knowledge of this particular program. There are regular update announcements here in the Tools section, though, so I'm hoping there are other users here, who may recognize the problem I'll be describing. We will take it to Photodex tech support next, if necessary.

This happens to be version 2.6.1775, which is not too recent a release. However, I've been all through the changelog of versions since, and nothing there jumped out at me. The 'Troubleshooting' section of their printed manual runs to just a few sentences -- nothing too helpful -- and we are already aware of the obvious issues, like not allowing another running program to interrupt by doing things like update itself or download stuff while Proshow is doing its thing.

What happens sometimes is that Proshow appears to burn a slideshow or group of slideshows on one DVD successfully, and in fact tells you that it has burned the show successfully. But the disc is D.O.A. when you go to play it -- "NO DISC" in any standalone player. Among software players, the only one I could get to touch these discs was PowerDVD, which says the disc has an "unsupported format." O.K., this left me curious, so I just installed the trial version of Isobuster 2.2, to take a look at a couple of these discs. (I was hoping there might be something there that I could rip, and then run through FixVTS.) There is no familiar or discernible DVD structure, so no surprise that the disc has turned out to be D.O.A. Isobuster returns this message: "During mounting of the disc, only a session/track layout could be found." It shows only a Session 1, Track 1 of size 952Mb (which might be a plausible size for a disc containing three 13 minute shows ?), but NO files or folders. Unless there are further things a more knowledgeable Isobuster user would know how to do from this point, I guess there ain't anything there to run through FixVTS.

I'm confident that the burner is good, and the media also. Indeed, about 75% or more of the slideshows she makes using this program -- with the same procedures -- come out fine. But it is looking to me like this program has some pronounced failure modes that are not well documented at all. The failures seem to occur somewhere in the final slideshow processing. The program should not be telling you that everything is O.K. when it clearly is not. I don't see any provision in the program for Test / Verify on a slideshow. The lady I'm helping tells me that she always plays the assembled slideshow on the computer just prior to burning, in Proshow, and Proshow is able to play it.

If you have some insight into what may be going on here, we would very much like to hear it.

[guns1inger]

Never, ever, ever burn directly to DVD from an authoring tool. Ever. You are just asking for coasters. Authoring tools that have burning engines (and many do) usually throw them in as an after thought. Secondly, you get no opportunity to test the results before committing them to disc.

Start by writing the results to the HDD first and test playing. This will tell you if the compilation process is failing, or the burn process. If all is well, burn with something reliable, like Imgburn. Then test the burn.

[Seeker47]

Edit on the original message seems to be no longer available, so I wanted to post these adjustments. She corrects me that she has successfully burned about 97 % of 61 slideshow discs to date, straight from Proshow Gold, many of which contain multiple slideshows -- one of them up to eleven. She also takes great exception to my description of her general computer skills, which are likely much better than I suggested. While I'm sure the comment about a good, separate burning tool is valid, we would particularly like to hear from users of Proshow Gold who may have run into this before. (I can see that a separate burn to HDD first would have diagnostic merit, but would double an already lengthy process. And there is the matter of that rather high success rate already, just with Proshow . . . .)

The particular problem at hand seems to derive from one of three slideshows that is faulty in some unknown regard. Two of them burn o.k. separately (again, directly from Proshow), while the third one does not. It appears that combining these on one disc causes this package of shows to fail.