Hi I need Help. I recently purchased a DVD burner. A sony OEM internal DVD burner made external via FIREWIRE (SO-DWU14A ... SONY DVD-R/DVD+R/CDR WRITER DRIVE OEM // you can see it at www.greytech.com under CD optical Storage devices ). Anyway I made some home mini DV movies edited them in Adobe Premiere 6.5 encoded 2 of them as .MPG (mpeg2)and left one as a raw AVI. I authored the DVD using Vegas DVD Architect v1 with the new update. The burn was successfull. I burned it at 1x write used Maxell DVD-R 4.47 GIG disks and Prino -R 4.47 GIG disks. I put the DVD in to my Toshiba SD2200 dvd standalone player (which can read DVD-R). The picture looked horrible. You could see the videos, menu etc. BUT there were big blocks moving everywhere(i don't know what to call them) it played sticky very scrambled. That's the best way I can describe it. I then used different software to author and burn more DVD's just incase it was a software problem. ULEAD movie factory gave the same results. I tried everything to correct the problem, disabled AntiVirus, uninstalled EZ CD Creator, and DeFragged my Drive selected my region for the burner. Still get the same crappy blocky, choppiness. I also put the DVD into 4 other DVD standalones. THE SAME THING HAPPENS. Infact it's identical....the blocks and choppyness happens in the exact times on all the machines. My Computer System? P III 866 mhz Windows 2000 Professional 30 GIG HD 512 MB RAM Can anyone help me? Has anyone had this problem? PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!! PS. I'm thinking of exchanging it for the Pioneer 106. Since I can't find any support for this Sony one anywhere.
Fibre, You may have compressed your video, which would explain the blockiness. How big was your original DV AVI? After you authored them, was it a lot smaller? DV got a constant bit rate of 3.6Mbits/s which is very good DVD quality. If the authoring process also transcoded/reencoded the original you may have ended up with VCD or SVCD quality instead. Have you tried to copy a movie and check the results. This would at least rule out hardware issues. Anosis.
Thanks 4 the reply. You might have a point about the compression. I made them 1 month ago before I bought the burner can't remember original AVI file sizes. What I can tell you the AVIs were alot bigger. 5 minuntes of raw AVI. The final edit was 3:00 min at 150 MB (MPEG). However I think it's highly unlikely. I burned 3 files. 2 were compressed into an MPEG-2 and 1 was just a raw AVI which the the DVD authorware (Vegas DVD Architect) compressed for me into a proper dvd playable file. But the main reason why I don't think it was just the compression is because it was'nt just the movies that just screwed up, the menu looked the same. It was just an image. And it looked the same as the movies, of couse just stopped on a single frame. So if the movies were compressed wrong (let's say) would that screw up the menu? As for buring and copying a movie DVD I have not tried. I'll try that. But let's just say it does'nt could it be anything else I'm missing? BTW what software should I use to duplicate a DVD movie? For testing of course thanks
I guess I missed the part where you pointed out that even the menu is blocky. One other reason for choppy playback is the actual DVD media. Through again that seems unlikely since you already tried two different media's. It is possible, I suppose that the external layout over firewire is problematic, but at 1x speeds there should be no problem. How does the movie look like if you play it directly from your PC? Try the original if you still have it as well as the already authored verison of it. Basically, you need to figure out where you loose the quality. Is it after premiere and before authoring, after authoring but befor burning or after burning. BTW, 3 min of MPEG and a total of 150MB would equate to about 830kBytes/s (DV is at 3.6MB/s) - that is not much. Regards, anosis
Could be overcompression. If you compress a whole bunch it can make the frames sputter along in a choppy manner. Might also be that the stand alone players don't handle the recorded media well (some accept +r, some -r, some both, some neither).
hello again, First off I returned the DVD burner. I'm exchanging it for a Pioneer 106. Reason? I looked for firmware updates for the Sony. It's like this drive does not exist. I could'nt find nothing online for it. As for the Pioneer 106 it has Firmware Updates and a ton of user reviews. People in general seem happier with it. As for playing the DVD on my PC. I have a PC DVD ROM, and of course the burner. Both gave me errors. "REGION NETWORK NOT SUPORTED". I had no idea what this was. So I looked up my DVD ROM's properties. Found a Region code thing and entered Canada (that's where I live) and it gave me a region of 1. Now now it plays. BUT! it plays with the same choppy, pixelated manner as my standalone DVD player. Pariah - My player does support DVD-R 100% As for the compression issue with Adobe Premiere 6.5. I captured another Mini DV movie. I went to the Adobe MPEG encoder. There are alot of settings. However I used the same compression (default) 6000 kBytes/s. hmmmm? But could the problem be my computer? Is it to slow for the burner? (see specs in 1st post). oh and my video card is a G-Force 32MB. Well I'm getting the Pioneer on Monday. Hopefully the problem was the Burner.
hello again, First off I returned the DVD burner. I'm exchanging it for a Pioneer 106. Reason? I looked for firmware updates for the Sony. It's like this drive does not exist. I could'nt find nothing online for it. As for the Pioneer 106 it has Firmware Updates and a ton of user reviews. People in general seem happier with it. As for playing the DVD on my PC. I have a PC DVD ROM, and of course the burner. Both gave me errors. "REGION NETWORK NOT SUPORTED". I had no idea what this was. So I looked up my DVD ROM's properties. Found a Region code thing and entered Canada (that's where I live) and it gave me a region of 1. Now now it plays. BUT! it plays with the same choppy, pixelated manner as my standalone DVD player. Pariah - My player does support DVD-R 100% As for the compression issue with Adobe Premiere 6.5. I captured another Mini DV movie. I went to the Adobe MPEG encoder. There are alot of settings. However I used the same compression (default) 6000 kBytes/s. hmmmm? But could the problem be my computer? Is it to slow for the burner? (see specs in 1st post). oh and my video card is a G-Force 32MB. Well I'm getting the Pioneer on Monday. Hopefully the problem was the Burner.
It might be your media that the writer didn't like as I have had that same problem. Picture came out blockly and near unviewable. Try some different media as my sony writer is picky about the kinda media it takes. Alot cheaper than a new writer!
Thanks for the advice koola. I did try 2 types of media. Maxell -R and Princo (I think that's what they're called. But you still might be right about the media. Any way I exchanged the Burner for the one I originally ordered. He gave me the Sony because he was out of stock with the Pioneer. Let's see what happens with the new burner. I did read an interesting "DVD how to" last night. Rendering Lower field not upper I'm going to post a new thread about this.
