Weird playback of a DIVX file on DVD player

[gastrof]

I downloaded an episode of STAR TREK: PHASE II from their website, and it arrived as a file that had a file name ending in "divx.avi".

I assumed it was a DIVX file, and burned it directly to a DVD.

When I went to play it on my DVD player, tho', while aspect ratio, audio, playback speed, color, etc. was fine, there was this pastel violet glow at the bottom of the picture that would sometimes bleed into the rest of the screen.

Can someone tell me if I did anything wrong? Should I have converted the file to something else, etc?

(PS- My Magnavox DVD recorder, which should have been able to play a Divx file, didn't recognize the DVD for playback.)

[davexnet]

As in any situation like this, use Mediainfo to examine the internal file attributes.
Put it in text view and post the results here.

[jagabo]

I downloaded one Spanish language video from there -- the first one I came across that claimed to be Divx AVI. It was Divx 5.0 with pretty normal properties but it used 2 warp point GMC. No Divx/DVD, or other standalone player supports that.

Do you have a link to the actual file you downloaded?

[jman98]

They do some weird stuff with their encodes. I have the impression that they are trying their best but that the people responsible don't really know what they are doing. One of their releases was a QuickTime file and the frame rate was something like 23.7 fps. It wasn't 23.96 but something around 23.7 if I remember correctly. I blame incompetence rather than maliciousness. Their website was dead, as in 100% completely and utterly down, for a few weeks this summer because they had ONE guy who knew how to fix what was wrong with it and he was unavailable. They don't have a lot of people there with strong IT skills. They've got excellent CGI people working on the episodes, but the people doing their encodes seem to just have a incomplete understanding of what they need to do.

I always end up re-encoding their files. Nothing they put out is really 100% right, although in some cases the problems are relatively small. The weird frame rate problem I mentioned earlier was easy enough to fix in AviSynth.

It could be worse. The numbskulls at Hidden Frontier (an earlier Star Trek fan series, but lower quality than Phase II) used to put out QuickTime files at 15 fps and VCD type resolutions. Geez man, maybe jagabo and manono know some kind of magic I don't but there's not anything I know to do that can get 15 fps to look like natural movement. I just encoded the files to VCD compatible MPEG-1 and I re-encoded the audio to 48 KHz. I used Sonic Scenarist to create a DVD with a boatload of their episodes on it. MPEG-1 is valid on DVD at VCD bit rates and resolutions as long as you get the audio at 48 KHz, so it's made an interesting test disc that I can use to see if a DVD player is smart enough to play the DVD as it's within legal, if unusual, DVD specs.