DVD skipping scenes

[bemymonkey]

Hi everyone,

I'm having a bit of a problem with a DVD - whether I'm playing from the hard drive or directly from the disc it seems to "skip" in certain scenes. It only skips in some players/encoders - i.e. VLC skips, as well as the output from Handbrake. The output from AutoGK doesn't skip, and neither does MPC.

Is the DVD just encoded badly?

[Pulstar]

What do you mean by 'skip'? Jaggy effects or the player skipping entire scenes? If it's the former, the encoder isn't of high quality when it comes to motion estimation and error correction. Anyway this is good criteria for judging a quality encode
- Play the disc in a normal DVD player on a standard TV. If it plays fine then you're in the clear
- Enable MPEG2 decoding in ffdshow, and use the YADIF deinterlacer. If jaggy effects are still present then you have to re-author/encode the DVD using a better app/codec!

But if your DVD skips entire scenes then it could be your PC has buffer underrun due to high bitrate scenes, therefore some players would be overwhelmed and decide to jump to the next keyframe. It could happen if your CPU isn't multicored.

[bemymonkey]

By skipping, I mean that it just skips a few seconds. That half second is just missing - at seemingly random places.

Encoding to X264 with Handbrake results in the skips always being in the same place - I get the feeling that Handbrake had the same problems decoding the DVD stream as VLC. Obviously Handbrake only decoded the material once, which is why the skips are always in the same place.

I've tried about 10 other DVDs (they were running on my secondary display all day) in VLC, and didn't notice a single skip. Seems to be limited to the one DVD, so I'm guessing it's an encoding error in the DVD, which is surprising (it's a retail film DVD). Maybe MPC just has better error correction... Playing directly from the DVD has the same result as playing from the rip as well, so it wasn't a crappy rip.

I'm pretty sure it's not buffer underruns, though - C2D P7370, 2.5gigs of RAM and a 7200RPM drive should be more than enough to play even the highest bitrate DVDs ;)...


Thanks for the tips so far :)

[setarip_old]

Hi!Playing directly from the DVD has the same resultHave you tried cleaning the original DVD?

[bemymonkey]

Looks perfectly clean... not surprising, considering it's brand new ;)

The thing is, the copy ripped to the hard drive (as a VIDEO_TS folder) also skips at different places each time you reopen it in VLC - or each time you encode it with Handbrake. So it's not the physical DVD media itself, and it's not a read error during the ripping... :(