Audio playback from DVD-R

[kennethrjohnson]

Last night I finally burned my first real DVD-R, using this process:

Capture into Matrox and Premiere
Edit movie in Premiere
Export to MPEG2 using the Ligos plugin to Premiere
Import the MPEG2 to DVDiT SE
Set up menus and chapter points in DVDiT
Use DVDiT to create DVD volume on hard drive
Use Prassi to burn the ts_video to the DVD-R.

Functionally the DVD-R plays correctly on the DVD player. But .. when I play it on my set top DVD player with my TV, there is sometimes a little "burble" in the audio. It plays on the DVDiT timeline with no audio problem. This is just on the set top DVD player.

The audio is regular DV standard 48K, stereo PCM 16 bit, and was presented to DVDiT as part of a multiplexed .mpg file.

I will probably experiment to see if the bitrate I chose encoding into MPEG2 (variable with 8000 max, 4000 average) is pushing the DVD player too hard and what I am hearing is audio "frame dropping." But I'm wondering if anyone else
has experience with this.
Ken Johnson, Rochester, Minnesota

[Visoblast]

You are not pushing the DVD player to hard. The DVD spec requires that it handle 9.8Mbps sustained MPEG-2 video, and read at a sustained rate of just over 10Mbps.

Your player may be getting periodic read errors from the disk (as in bad data). When one of these burbles happens, backup and play it again to see if it happens consistantly. If not, it's just a read error. My old DVD player does this, but not much with audio. My Playstation 2 has no trouble at all.

You may want to give DVDit an elementry MPEG video stream and a seporate audio file. It might help. Might not.

[Darkbird]

I believe DVDit SE is converting your mpeg1 layer2 audio back to PCM (wave) audio, which uses up a lot of the allowed bitrate (same as playing an audio cd). Back off on the maximum video bitrate and see if that helps. Like max of 7000Mbps. If the encoding software has a "DVD Compliant" option, use it.

According to the DVD spec, NTSC market (North America, etc) players only have to support PCM/wave audio and AC3/dolby-digital audio. If a disc is made with mpeg1 audio only, it risks not being playable by some players.

Sonic's low end authoring software converts all audio to PCM because they don't want to include the licensing costs for a dolby digital ac3 encoder in a low cost product, and they dont' want to risk making a disc that won't play in all players by using mpeg1 audio.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Darkbird on 2001-08-17 11:19:06 ]</font>