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Hi all, I've been working on a DVD authoring project for the past few weeks and I've hit an issue I can't seem to resolve on my own. I've used this site quite a bit in learning all the details of this process, so I thought I'd ask for your expert assistance. Here's the rundown:
I'm trying to create a DVD of a VHS that I captured. I've already converted the capture to a compliant MPEG-2 using HCEnc, and converted the audio track to AC-3. I've created a simple menu (still, not animated) that just has a play button, and a few sub-menu's for selecting chapters. All the buttons and backgrounds are still images.
I've learned how to work GUI for dvdauthor, and have successfully authored my disc with no errors. I burned the disc using imgburn. The disc plays fine in VLC and all the menus work, but I can't get it to play on non-PC devices. One DVD player I tested will navigate the menus perfectly, but trying to play the video results in garbled macro-blocks. The other DVD player I tested will also navigate the menus, but playing the video stays on the main menu, although the playback counter is running.
While troubleshooting, I tried streaming it to a set-top media player box I have, and trying to play through the menu results in the first second of audio following by nothing, and it just sits at the menu, similar to what my 2nd DVD player test gave. If I play the video file itself it plays fine. This leads me to believe there is an error in the authoring of the menus somewhere.
I have my project set for NTSC, and have tried both the dvdauthor and MuxMan engines. I've checked every setting I can think of but I seem to be stuck.
If anyone has any ideas it would be greatly appreciated.
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If the disk plays through the menus with vlc then the issue is not the menus.
May I ask what brand of media you burnt the disk to including its max burn speed. Did you burn that disk at max speed ?
One often finds that stand-alones are more sensitive to burnt media. So 1. Use good quality media such as Verbatim and 2. burn at 50% of the rated maximum speed. -
I use Verbatim DVD+R's, and I burnt these test discs at 16x, which is less than half of what my drive is capable of.
I initially suspected that the DVD+R's might be the problem, as I was unable to change the book type with imgburn. However, imgburn reports the book type as DVD-ROM after burning, and the playback from the WDTV Live box I tested with would navigate the menus but not able to play a title from them.
If the actual files were OK, then I would have expected the WDTV Live to playback correctly, which it did not. -
Please test with other software players than VLC.
If the DVD doesn't work in MPC-HC or Windows Media Player, then probably it has an authoring issue. -
Just tested with MPC-HC, did not work.
Menu and navigation works fine, but trying to play any title or chapter results in garbled macro-blocks, exactly the result I got from the first DVD player I tested it on. Interesting.
So I'm even more convinced that it's an authoring issue with GUI for dvdauthor...but I've checked everything I can possibly think of that might cause a playback issue, and to the best of my knowledge I've done everything correctly.
Any ideas on what might cause this? -
Without guessing you should grab pgcedit, open the dvd in pgcedit and use the scratch pad feature to pull all the information related to menu's and titles, save the log and post it here. It should give insight as to what is causing the issue.
Sounds like a still menu bug ... we'll need to know the brand and models of home dvd players used for testing.
Note: Burn dvd+r at 4x, not higher ... make sure your players are certified to play dvd+r. -
You mis-understood what I wrote.
If your disks are rated 16x then you burn at 8x max(4x is good advice too) not half of what the drive is capable of (there are no 32x blank dvds afaik).
Also try another authoring program such as avstodvd - could be easier than your chosen one. Atleast then you may find if it is a media/burn issue.
I assume your stand-alones are not particualrily old models. -
I'm trying to figure out how to pull this log information from pgcEdit but I'm having some difficulty. By "scratch pad" I'm assuming you mean the scratchbook feature, but I don't see any way to pull the menu commands into this section, only to add new commands (copy and pasting them isn't working). I do see a "Show Log" under the view menu, but it doesn't sound like this is what you meant. I will continue to experiment with it until I figure it out.Originally Posted by Bjs
Here is the DVD player information you requested:
DVD Player #1: Magnavox MWR 20V6
DVD Player #2: Philips DVP5982/37
Unit #1 is one of those VCR/DVD combos, which I would consider the lower quality player. Unit #2 is a much nicer region-free player that can play back various types of compressed formats. Both players appear to list DVD+R as supported medium.
The Magnavox unit showed the exact same symptoms that I saw when testing in MPC-HC last night, if that is relevant. -
Yes, I did mis-understand you, my apologies. The discs are rated for 16x, and I burned them at that speed just because I was trying to test them quickly, I would normally burn them at either 4x or 8x. Since the files are not working in MPC-HC either, it seems wise to wait until I can figure out the pgcEdit program before burning another test, but I will be sure to do them at 4x to rule out any issues with that.Originally Posted by DB83
I actually experimented with AVStoDVD early on, but even after carefully adjusting all the settings for high quality, I wasn't real pleased with the final result. Also, the menu construction abilities were lacking compared to GUI for dvdauthor, and it cannot do an author without re-encoding. I encoded my assets in HCEnc manually and got a much nicer looking MPEG-2 file, so I decided to go that route instead.
I just posted the info on the standalone players a moment ago, they are at both ends of the spectrum...one nice, one not so great. They both failed to play back in slightly different ways, but menus and navigation worked on both. -
Just an update on the pgcEdit log I'm working on...I managed to figure out how to get the commands into the scratchbook, I created new sections with descriptive names that matched the actual names as closely as possible, and saved it to a .sbk file. The resulting file is plain text, but has no line breaks and all the commands look like they've been converted to hex values?
Still not sure if this is the right kind of log file, but I can post it if it would be helpful. -
I am surprised about your experience with avstodvd.
1. It uses Henc to encode
2. It does not re-encode if the assets are already dvd-compliant.
Do you by any chance still have the video_ts folder on your HDD prior to burning or even an iso. Does that play with other players ?
Another thing. Do you have PowerDVD installed ?
You can always test on rw media. -
I had already deleted the one I created with AVStoDVD, but I went ahead and tested it, and you are correct in that it does not re-encode if the assets are already encoded. There was nothing to indicate that this was the case so I never tried it, but thank you for pointing this out! My original issue with this was that my final DVD was...I don't want to say "cropped" because the whole frame was there...but it did not fill the entire window, like the video was smaller than the screen. My original video is 720x480, and the final DVD was as well, so I could not explain why the picture was smaller. When I manually encoded this file in HCEnc I did not encounter this issue.Originally Posted by DB83
To continue troubleshooting, I decided to throw them into AVStoDVD again and try it out, and I got some interesting results. My audio and video files both have a length of 36:08, and when I add them to AVStoDVD this is what shows in the window. When I start the authoring process, it complains that my files are shorter than the expected length of 45:11, and asks if I want to proceed anyways. I'm not sure where it's getting this number from, and it also shows the final DVD size to be about 300Mb larger than it actually is, which I assume is based on this incorrect time it's expecting.
So I told it go ahead and it failed, which I found was caused by the creation of automatic chapters, which in turn was based on the incorrect longer time, so it was trying to create chapters beyond where the video ended. I simply disabled chapter creation and ran it again, and it completed successfully. When I tested it with MPC-HC, I get nothing but a black screen, no video....but I can still hear the audio. And again, if I select the actual .VOB file itself, it will play that normally.
Based on this new information, I'm starting to wonder if there may be an issue with my video file? I followed this guide when I created the file, making sure to click the "Make DVD Compliant" button just before starting the encoding process, which I thought would guarantee that my end result would be as correct as possible.
Is there something I'm missing here? -
Ok. We may need to revert to basics here.
1. The specifications of your original video - mediainfo text report
2. The specifications of your encoded video - likewise.
All we know right now is that your final video is ntsc. Was the original ? -
Here is the mediainfo text report on the original capture file:
And here is the mediainfo text report for the mpeg that I encoded in HCEnc:Code:General Complete name : E:\capture\capture.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave Format profile : OpenDML File size : 13.0 GiB Duration : 38mn 11s Overall bit rate : 48.8 Mbps Video ID : 0 Format : HuffYUV Format version : Version 2 Codec ID : HFYU Duration : 38mn 11s Bit rate : 47.3 Mbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 3:2 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:2 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Interlaced Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 4.566 Stream size : 12.6 GiB (97%) Audio ID : 1 Format : PCM Format settings, Endianness : Little Format settings, Sign : Signed Codec ID : 1 Duration : 38mn 11s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 1 536 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Bit depth : 16 bits Stream size : 420 MiB (3%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 10 ms (0.30 video frame) Interleave, preload duration : 69 ms
The original source was an NTSC VHS. I captured in Virtualdub using huffyuv, wrote an avisynth script to do some corrections, and fed that script into HCEnc to do the mpeg encode.Code:General Complete name : E:\capture\capture.m2v Format : MPEG Video Format version : Version 2 File size : 1.24 GiB Duration : 36mn 8s Overall bit rate mode : Variable Overall bit rate : 4 927 Kbps Video Format : MPEG Video Format version : Version 2 Format profile : Main@Main Format settings, BVOP : Yes Format settings, Matrix : Custom Format settings, GOP : Variable Duration : 36mn 8s Bit rate mode : Variable Bit rate : 4 927 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 8 000 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 4:3 Frame rate : 23.976 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:2 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Scan order : 2:3 Pulldown Compression mode : Lossy Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.595 Time code of first frame : 00:00:00;00 Stream size : 1.24 GiB (100%)
I'm currently trying to re-encode the file again, but this time I have lowered the maximum bitrate from 9000 down to 8000. All of the information I can find suggests that a 9000 max bitrate should be within DVD specifications, but I figured it would be one more thing that could be ruled out.
As I'm typing this I noticed in the report that it says the max bitrate is 8000, but I'm certain that I had it at 9000 when I ran it the first time. Hmm.... -
The frame rate it the encoded file is not dvd-spec so the timing is wrong.
Ok, I may be wrong here but I did not think you can IVTC as you have done to go back to dvd. Rather to keep the frame rate at 29.97 fps. -
There is a setting in HCEnc that restores the playback framerate to 29.97, source here.
The specific section:
My understanding is that IVTC is needed if the VHS tape was itself sourced from film (which this one is), that removes the duplicate frames which drops the framerate to 23.97. Then enabling the 3:2 pulldown option in HCEnc makes a correction for those missing frames and restores the original playback framerate of 29.97.3:2 Pulldown
If you're encoding material for NTSC playback that was originally on film you should be starting with 23.976fps video that must have pulldown flags added to make it read at 29.97fps. This checkbox enables pulldown for 23.976fps sources, but doesn't add any flags to video at other framerates. -
Is 4:2:2 compliant with the DVD-Video specsOriginally Posted by toodarkparx
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I can understand that logic but should you lose 2 minutes on ntsc > ntsc ?
Of course I am in PAL land where thing are a little different. -
Wow, good eyes there! I do not know the answer, I just started another encode job to see if this might be the problem, and I will do a little research while it's running.Originally Posted by El Heggunte
Is 4:2:2 compliant with the DVD-Video specsOriginally Posted by toodarkparx
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Those 2 minutes are from some trimming I did in the avisynth script, not from the conversion.Originally Posted by DB83
I'm investigating the suggestion about the color space right now and I'll report back with my results in about an hour. -
Good news, problem solved!
It seems that the DVD specs do indeed require a YV12 colorspace, and not the YUY2 that my capture is done in. I haven't seen that detail mentioned anywhere, but some searching turned up mention of it deep down in some guides and forum posts.
I re-encoded the file with ConvertToYV12 () added to my avisynth script, and after re-authoring again it now works in MPC-HC, and on both set top players we have.
Thank you very much El Heggunte for pointing me in the right direction, don't know how long it would have taken to figure that out. Thanks to DB83 as well for your insightful comments.
Greatly appreciated! -
Glad to read it is now sorted. Slighty worried about that 'make dvd compliant' setting if it does not deal with the colorspace issue.
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I agree, I would think that even though it's being handled by another program, HCEnc might throw up a message about it or something, but I guess that's up to the developer.
Hopefully anyone else that runs into this problem will at least be able to find this thread now.
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