Bad Media Problem or Bad Encoding?

[RickyD]

I've got a good collection of DIVX DVD rips I downloaded off of Kazaa and recently I've decided to burn them up on cds as to have a physical collection.

I set out and bought a 50 pack spindle of 80min/700mb Pine CD-Rs. I bought them fairly cheap from a friend and those were the only kind in the shop so that was it. I've encoded Divx movies before and I follow the directions here on the site. I first rip the audio with Virtual Dub, then use the VCD NTSCFilm template with TMPGEnc, then I use the source range to only encode the first half of the movie, set the margin setting so that it stays widescreen and then repeat again for the second half.

I normally burn movies onto Verbatim CD-RWs and I've never had a problem with those but some problems have been popping-up with these new ones. It started with the movie The Time Machine. I burned up both cds fine using CDRWIN 5 (Nero won't accept my HP 8200 external in XP) and the first cd played perfectly. The second CD ran into problems though. It just plays really crappy, with jumpy frames as well as over lapping frames. At about 10 or 11 minutes in it just sort freezes alltogether and stays stuck with funny sounds.

I had actually burned several movies before I sat down to watch them and after watching them I found out that the same thing happens with Baseketball cd2, Snatch cd2, Office Space cd2 and with the movie Idle Hands, both are bad. I'm using a Panasonic DVD-RV31 by the way.

The thing that really gets me is that I had burned Baseketball onto my Verbatim CD-RWs and it had burned fine but when I burned the exact same mpgs onto these CD-Rs, the second CD messes up.

I did a little more research and took the second Time Machine CD and copied the dat file onto my harddrive to watch it. The dat file plays great in Windows Media and I have no problem.

Now where does the problem come in? Is it the media? If it is then why does only the second cd mess up? Should I be encoding them differently? This has got me real mad over the fact that I stupidly deleted the movies off of my harddrive after I had burned them and I'm going to have to download them again. If you have any ideas or answers on the subject please post them. Thank you.

RickyD

[tenders]

i also use pine cdr's. out of about 400(so far) i have yet to find a bad one!

my guess is that your files have errors on them. have you scanned for errors in virtual dub?

[RickyD]

I've come to believe that the pine cds aren't high enough quality to be played on my DVD player.

To test this I did a CD to CD copy between Time Machine CD2 and a Verbatim CD-RW I had. The copy went fine and the CD-RW played the movie on my DVD player perfectly. I did the same with the second cd of Snatch and I got the same results.

What I wonder is why only half of the cds mess up, while the other half don't? I'm thinking the Pine cds are on the border line for being playable on my DVD player and so far I've got a little less than half that are good enough. I'm think to go buy some Verbatim CD-Rs to see how they work. If anyone has any ideas please post them. Thanks.

[RickyD]

Well I ran a Virtual Dub scan on the cd and the outcome was that 35 frames masked (3 frames bad, 32 frames good but undecodable). I don't think that should effect the movie.

RickyD

[tenders]

if you are encoding it and it has bad frames it will definatly have an effect!

do some research on virtual dub(perhaps a forum search) and you will find out how to use vdub to correct the errors in your avi's.