Slight freezing about 1 mins into re-encoded DVD (from AVI)?!?!

[josam]

Can anybody help me? I am very new to this re-encoding business. I have been downloading tv programmes as AVI files and re-encoding them using ffmpegX into DVD mpeg2enc. Then burning them onto DVD to play on my Eltax DV-200 DVD player.

Everything works perfectly apart from about 1mins in to every programme it freezes and jumps for about 1 mins and then returns to normal. This has happened on every single one that I have re-encoded so far.

What am I doing wrong?!?!

[Ollie6431]

...from about 1mins in to every programme it freezes and jumps for about 1 mins and then returns to normal. This has happened on every single one that I have re-encoded so far.

What am I doing wrong?!?!

If you search for this topic in the forums, I am sure you would find many useful discussions. The bottom line is that this problem can be due to any of the following:
- source video
- encoding software
- DVD
- DVD player

Since you mentioned that this problem occurs the same way for every DVD, one can eliminate the first cause (source video).

To find out whether encoding/burning software is the problem, try playing the DVD on your PC. If the freeze occurs then, encoding /burning sofware is the culprit and you can try another one.

If the DVD plays fine on the PC, then DVD// DVD player is the problem. You then can try to play the DVD on various stand-alone DVD players (friends', relatives', etc.). If the DVD cannot play well on any players, try a different DVD media. Many users (including myself) prefer Verbatim. There are many other good DVD media as well. If the DVD can play on some but not all players, then you can either (a) try a different DVD media to make it work for your player, or (b) buy another player.

Strangely, some DVD players can play almost all burnt DVDs whereas some are very picky. The prices of the players and the DVD media do not seem to be a big factor.

[tomlee59]

As the previous poster said, there can be many causes of your symptom, and you should do a forum search as suggested. One relatively common cause of the problem you describe is choosing an excessive bitrate, in the belief that "more is better." Beyond a certain point, quality hardly improves at all, but the bitrate can get so high that the electronics can't process it fast enough. So you get the strange hiccup effect you describe. I don't know what the specs are on that player, but you may wish to run an experiment or two with a lower bitrate to see if you can make the problem go away, while maintaining good quality.

FYI, for recording TV shows, I find that going above about 1.5Mb/s for the video rate buys me very little with Divx. If your bitrate is grossly in excess of that value, you might find that downshifting a little bit will eliminate that odd behavior.

[josam]

Thanks for your replies, I apologise for coming straight in with a post without searching the forum but it is hard to know where to look and what words to search when you're very new to all this.

I only found out how to do the encoding recently from this site but there's so much to it I'm easily confused!!

I will do some testing as described.

Thanks again!!