Authoring Double Layer DVDs for personal recordings

[soneman]

I need to author a Double Layer DVD that contains several episodes of my favourite TV series which have been captured onto my PC. I'm talking about putting something like 25 episodes on 1 Double Layer DVD.

I usually use TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 for authoring a compilation like this but have only authored for Single Layer DVDs in the past.

I would just like to know if TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 can successfully author a Double Layer DVD from episodic content and create a Layer Break so that the episodes continue to play sequentially when it reaches the end of the first layer?

I can see at the bottom of the TMPGEnc DVD Author window that there is a bar that goes up to 8.5 GB but I'm not sure if it will create the Layer Break for my compilation and continue playing the episodes in the order that I set.

[jman98]

Your post implies that you want to put 25 episodes of TV show in DVD format on a double layer disc. Assuming 20 minutes per episode, which is almost certainly too little, would put your video bit rate at about 995 Kbps, which is under even VCD quality. If your episodes are longer, the bit rate falls even lower. Yes, you can do that, but the quality will suck. You'll have to reduce the resolution to VCD size (352x288) to have any hope of making this not look terrible. You can expect to see a lot of macroblocks in your video.

I don't use TMPGenc DVD Author at all, but it should be able to correctly make a layer break for you. However, some older DVD players will NOT play DL media at all. I have personally seen this. They'll stop playing the disc as soon as the layer break is reached. There is no fix for this if you have one of these players, but newer players (made within the past 2 years) should not do that. However, I cannot give you 100% assurance that some cheap piece of crap DVD player won't refuse to play DL media no matter what you do.

Note too that the ONLY DL media that works reliably is Verbatim DVD+R DL. If you buy any other brand, you are wasting your money. And the ONLY reliable burning program for any DVD media is the free ImgBurn program. If you are using Nero or some similar program, you may burn coasters.

[tomlee59]

To second the great advice jman98 has given you, if you still want to press onward to try squeezing that many (!) episodes on a single disc, then downshifting to VCD-resolution is your only (faint) hope. Back off on the audio bitrate, too (128kb/s at 48kHz sampling rate). I have a few multi-episode discs with about that much content, and the quality is none too good. "Watchable" is about the nicest thing one could say about them. For sitcoms and other broadcast cheese that you might only want to view on a smallish screen while on a long plane flight, it'll work. If your tastes go beyond that, though, you'll want to split up the content among multiple discs.

[soneman]

I don't use TMPGenc DVD Author at all, but it should be able to correctly make a layer break for you. However, some older DVD players will NOT play DL media at all. I have personally seen this. They'll stop playing the disc as soon as the layer break is reached. There is no fix for this if you have one of these players, but newer players (made within the past 2 years) should not do that. However, I cannot give you 100% assurance that some cheap piece of crap DVD player won't refuse to play DL media no matter what you do.

Note too that the ONLY DL media that works reliably is Verbatim DVD+R DL. If you buy any other brand, you are wasting your money. And the ONLY reliable burning program for any DVD media is the free ImgBurn program. If you are using Nero or some similar program, you may burn coasters.

I'm planning on using Verbatim 8x Double Layer DVD+R discs. I got them in a 5 pack with jewel cases, cost me about £15 so that comes to £3 per disc so not what you would call 'cheap'. I don't think I'm going to be burning them any faster than 4x anyway. I've got ImgBurn installed on my PC so will use that to burn the output that TMPGEnc DVD Author gives me.

I have tried burning Double Layer discs as a 1:1 backup copy of a commercial DVD with success and all of my DVD Players/Recorders have played the burned Double Layer discs without issues so compatibility isn't a problem because like I said, this disc I'm authoring is going to consist of personal recordings which I'm only going to playback in my home on my DVD equipment.

Picture quality on the recordings isn't that bad if I'm being completely honest. All recordings consisting of 20 minute episodes (ads have been edited out). I've already established that 12 episodes will fit on a Single Layer DVD so wanted to burn onto a Double Layer DVD to double the amount of episodes on one disc.

Can somebody just confirm that TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 will create a layer break for me if I chose to author a Double Layer DVD for personal recordings?

[jman98]

Please note that DL size is NOT twice the size of a single layer DVD. It's actually roughly 10% smaller. Keep that in mind as you plan.

Honestly it doesn't matter if TMPGenc DVD Author can't create a layer break for you because you can create one yourself using something like PgcEdit if you wish. I would assume that TMPGenc DVD Author can create a layer break though, but as I never used it, I can't confirm it with personal experience. I do find it hard to believe that it would not be able to do this.

[robjv1]

Wow! I don't think I've ever authored a DVD with more then six 25-30min episodes on a SL disc... I can't imagine what twelve would look like.

[lordsmurf]

Wow! I don't think I've ever authored a DVD with more then six 25-30min episodes on a SL disc... I can't imagine what twelve would look like.

I've done it a few times. You often need a two-page menu, however. Cramming all the titles on one tends to look like crap.

[tomlee59]

Wow! I don't think I've ever authored a DVD with more then six 25-30min episodes on a SL disc... I can't imagine what twelve would look like.

Take some bubble-wrap and make eyeglasses out of it. The world will then look a lot like the vids would.

[soneman]

Please note that DL size is NOT twice the size of a single layer DVD. It's actually roughly 10% smaller. Keep that in mind as you plan.

Honestly it doesn't matter if TMPGenc DVD Author can't create a layer break for you because you can create one yourself using something like PgcEdit if you wish. I would assume that TMPGenc DVD Author can create a layer break though, but as I never used it, I can't confirm it with personal experience. I do find it hard to believe that it would not be able to do this.

Yeah I already know about the Double Layer capacity limitation. It really comes up to about 7.9GB doesn't it? Whereas a Single Layer is 4.38GB when you double that it should come up to 8.7GB. But still a Double Layer DVD+R is almost double the capacity of a Single Layer DVD which is why I'm trying to put as many episodes as possible on the one disc.

Is there any way that I can check if a layer break has been created from the DVD folders that TMPGEnc DVD Author outputs? If I opened up the DVD folders using ImgBurn for example can it tell me that a layer break has been created for said DVD folders?

[guns1inger]

When you open the structure in Imgburn it will tell you where a layer break can go, and that is when you choose where it will be put when Imgburn burns the disc.

[VegasBud]

soneman,

One way to look at the capacity difference is:

You say that you can physically fit 12 episodes on a single layer disk. For a dual layer disk, that would be 24 episodes minus 10% equals 21 episodes (technically 21.6 episodes, but a partial episode would be useless).

Is there any way that I can check if a layer break has been created from the DVD folders that TMPGEnc DVD Author outputs?

Authoring software doesn't specify the layer break, the burning/"image creation" part of the process does...so the dvd folders do not contain any layer break information.

Once you're to that point, just use ImgBurn to select a layer break and burn the dvd folders to a disk.

[soneman]

Many thanks for the replies regarding layer break creation using ImgBurn.

I've just given it a try and I just want to know if the Padding, Percentage and SPLIP values have any meaning?



Note that this is from a different video project.

I can see that the green star is the ideal place to put the layer break but I just want to know what the other values mean so that I can make my own decision as to where to place the layer break (if required).

[VegasBud]

soneman,

The "Padding" column tells you how many sectors the cell had to be shifted to qualify as a layer break. For example, the first column of the top entry shows that cell would need to be shifted from LBA (Logical Block Address) 1808263 to LBA 2080944 by adding 272681 sectors of padding (second column - "Padding") before that cell. "Padding" sectors use up disk space, but they aren't accessed. Since each sector is 2048 bytes, the top entry, with 272681 sectors of padding, would add ~532 megabytes to the disk space required. The outer edge of the disk is less stable during reading or writing, so adding an unneeded half gigabyte to the data increases the probability of problems at the layer break.

The "percentage" ("%") column tells you how the data (including any padding) would be split between the two layers on the disk. Using the top entry as an example ("50/50"), 50% of the data would be on the first layer, and 50% of the data would be on the second layer. If an entry in the list had "60/40" in the "%" column, 60% of the data would be on the first layer, 40% on the second layer. The closer the "%" column is to "50/50", the farther the layer break is from the outer edge, and the less the chances of problems at the layer break.

The "SPLIP" column tells you whether the "Seamless Playback Linked In PCI" flag for that cell is set ("Yes") or clear ("No"). The specifications state the SPLIP flag should be clear.

While the above factors should be considered when selecting the best layer break location, the overriding factor is how an entry would look during playback (if that's where the layer break was to be placed). That's what the "Preview Selected Cell" button (at the bottom) is for.

All players require some period of time to reset for reading from the second layer of the disk...how long that takes will vary from player to player, but it always occurs. To make the layer change least apparent, on the largest number of players, choose a cell which begins with little or no motion (in the video) and no sound. The other end of the scale would be a cell that begins with an explosion that started in the previous cell. If that's all that's available, there isn't much choice, but a viewer is likely to see a glitch at the layer break during playback.

In the selection list you posted, the entry highlighted with the blue bar will be hard to beat. It's the first cell of the first chapter of the first pgc of the vts. Even without previewing the cell, you can be 100% sure the layer break will be undetectable during playback. The SPLIP flag is clear, there's only modest padding, and the data will be equally divided between the disk layers. All in all, it's a very good choice.

[soneman]

Many thanks for the detailed info VegasBud and everyone else who replied in this thread.

All sorted now.

[dessieclive]

soneman Author with TMPGEnc DVD Author use CloneDVD2 to work 2 Double Layer DVD result is a not 2 bad a dvd

[fvisagie]

soneman,
...

Being busy with my first ImgBurn DL DVD project and needing to know more about the issues around layer breaks and what to look for, I did a search on the forums and hit upon this post - great, wow!

All You Ever Needed To Know About ImgBurn and Selecting A Layer Break, in one concise post. Thanks for that, VegasBud.