Standalone player sound problem: analog out OK, digital bad

[ahfairley]

Just got DVD burner, and first test show I have a sound problem with burned DVDs on standalone player.

Burner is Pioneer A-104, players are Toshiba 3805 and a Samsung (711?)

I put together some video in Premiere, which I then converted and burned to DVD using DVD Workshop. When I play the disk in a DVD player, the sound is fine if I'm using the analog outs for sound from the player to my receiver, but if I use the coax digital out between player and receiver, the sound is choppy. (BTW, with commercial disks, sound is fine on either (but no 5.1 on analog outs, of course)). Same result with both the Toshiba and Samsung players, so I'm assuming the problem is not in the player, but with the disc. Video plays fine.

Here's the specs on the AVI file I imported into DVD Workshop:
320 x 240 24 bit color
29.970 fps
Compression Huffyuv 2.11
Audio PCM compression
44,100 Hz 16 bit stereo

Here are the output settings in DVD Workshop (chosen at burn time)
NTSC DVD 720 x 480
bit rate 6000 (I know rez and br is way higher than needed, but I was just testing to see if the player would gag on the disks.)
Audio 384 Kpbs [box showing 48,000 Hz greyed out and not changable]

Disks: Memorex DVD-RW and PrimeDisc DVD-R (generic type from shop4tech.com). Results are the same for both disks in Toshiba, Samsung doesn't recognize DVD-RW.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? I'm wondering if its because the audio in the AVI file converted by DVDWS was 44,1000, but shouldn't DVDWS fix that when it converts the AVI to mpeg? And why would problems show up in digital sound stream and not analog?

Thanks for all thoughts or experience.

Alan

[ahfairley]

I forgot to add that both the DVD-R and the DVD-RW play OK in the computer as well (using PowerDVD).

Alan

[ahfairley]

I tried a couple other approaches without success:

Open AVI file in VirtualDub and Save As with sound at 48,000 Hz 16 bit stereo, DV Workshop encodes and burns. Same result as before.

Encode AVI file to NTSC std DVD mpeg using TMPEGenc, burn with DVD workshop. From the speed of the initial passes, it look like DVD WS did not re-encode. Same results as before.

What's left to do is burning the DVD WS output file with Nero, or authoring with a different program.

Still waiting for any thoughts from you guys!

Alan

[ahfairley]

Further developments:

The receiver the DVD player is hooked up to is a Sony DE575. The receiver has three "sound field" options:

A.F.D.: Receiver auto detects type of signal and presents the sound as it was encoded.
Mode: Receiver applies programmed sound fields (cinema sound, concert hall sound, jazz club sound)
2 channel: stereo from L & R speakers only.

When I have input to the reciever from DVD player is via coax, A.F.D. and Mode give crappy sound (actually not so much choppy as actual gaps in the sound), but 2 channel works fine.

When input to the receiver from DVD player is via RCA (left & right channel only), all three sound field options work fine.

Anyone have any thoughts? Are there multiple sound streams encoded on the disk?

Alan