pulldown problem on sony standalone

[daveidmx]

i'm living in M/NTSC-3.58 land working on authoring an LD->DVD transfer. the two test players i talk about here are:
works -- Sony DVP-S350 fw v.2.005
doesn't work -- Sony DVP-S560D FW v.1.100

i've run into a problem that i believe is related to pulldown flags and buggy player firmware.

29.97 fps video plays back fine on both of the above players. this tells me that there is not an inherent media compatability or authoring problem.

23.976 fps video run through pulldown.exe works fine on one player but on the other player the following occurs. the first video frame is shown for 2 fields (as expected). immediately thereafter, the video switches back to the sony player's background picture. interestingly, the aspect ratio tags are read properly as a 16:9 stream will cause the sony background picture to be letterboxed. the player's time display will continue to increment as though the disc is playing, and i can perform chapter jumps and scanning even though there is no video.

i assume that a firmware update should allow the buggy player to play this video stream normally, but since the player in question plays purchased DVDs fine, i must assume that there is some other method of setting frame flags/sequence codes so that it will play without a firmware update.

has anyone encountered similar problems? anyone know enough about MPEG2 video streams to comment?


near as i can tell, the "proper" pulldown method is setting
prog_seq=0, prog_frame=1, field/frame=frame, and then cycling
tff:rff = 00, 01, 10, 11
does anyone know of a tool to view these flags in the video stream?

[Inwards]

Originally posted by daveidmx
i'm living in M/NTSC-3.58 land working on authoring an LD->DVD transfer. the two test players i talk about here are:
works -- Sony DVP-S350 fw v.2.005
doesn't work -- Sony DVP-S560D FW v.1.100

i've run into a problem that i believe is related to pulldown flags and buggy player firmware.

29.97 fps video plays back fine on both of the above players. this tells me that there is not an inherent media compatability or authoring problem.

23.976 fps video run through pulldown.exe works fine on one player but on the other player the following occurs. the first video frame is shown for 2 fields (as expected). immediately thereafter, the video switches back to the sony player's background picture. interestingly, the aspect ratio tags are read properly as a 16:9 stream will cause the sony background picture to be letterboxed. the player's time display will continue to increment as though the disc is playing, and i can perform chapter jumps and scanning even though there is no video.

i assume that a firmware update should allow the buggy player to play this video stream normally, but since the player in question plays purchased DVDs fine, i must assume that there is some other method of setting frame flags/sequence codes so that it will play without a firmware update.

has anyone encountered similar problems? anyone know enough about MPEG2 video streams to comment?


near as i can tell, the "proper" pulldown method is setting
prog_seq=0, prog_frame=1, field/frame=frame, and then cycling
tff:rff = 00, 01, 10, 11
does anyone know of a tool to view these flags in the video stream?



Pulldown.exe will allow you to make most of these changes to the stream yourself. Try something like:

pulldown.exe source.m2v target.m2v -prog_frames p -prog_seq i

If you want a _really_ detailed view of the video stream you can use BBVINFO (part of the bbTools package) with option "2".