Why can't I make a working DVD?

[fluffysnurgle]

I have been trying for weeks but no matter what I do I cannot reliably make working DVDs that play in my standalone player (a Toshiba, don't remember the exact model, but it's fairly new).

Most of the guides seem to be oriented toward copying DVDs. I don't care about this, I am only interested in making DVDs of my own content (mostly home movies from VHS). I'm pretty good with AVISynth and Virtualdub and have no trouble with deinterlacing, resizing, filtering, colorspaces, etc.

The tools I have been using:
QUEnc 0.56 (I also have the ancient AVI2MPG2/bbMpeg encoder, I like it because it allows setting of just about every conceivable MPEG-2 option, but it's very slow)
DVDAuthorGUI 0.996b
AVISynth 2.5
BeSweetGUI 0.7b4, AC3Machine 0.41
DVD Decrypter (for burning the ISO images that DVDAuthorGUI makes)
pulldown.exe for setting pulldown flag on 24fps content

I've tried various discs, from generic DVD-R media to Maxell DVD+RW to Philips DVD-R, they all do the same thing. I do not think the disc is the problem.

Sometimes my source is 24p, sometimes 30p, sometimes 30i. It depends on where it comes from. What usually happens is that the DVD player loads the disk, starts to play it, and then it freezes up after a couple of seconds. I can fast forward or rewind through the entire disc and it looks and works fine, no problems.

Once in a blue moon, one of the 30p encodes will work properly with only an occasional hitch in the playback.

Generally the settings I use are:
QUEnc: 3500 or 5000 average bitrate, 7000 max bitrate, use VBR checked, interlaced encoding checked if source is interlaced. Source is always 720x480, 4:3 aspect ratio.
AC3Machine: 256K bitrate, 2 channel
DVDAuthorGUI: Nothing fancy. Just one or two titles on the disc. I did try some menus and such with it, they worked great.

I'm not really concerned too much with getting great quality. I just want it to work.

If I need to use a different program that is fine, the only rule is that I want to use all free software to do it.

[manono]

Hello and welcome to the forum-

First look up your player in the Videohelp.com DVD Player Database (http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers) to make sure it plays DVD+/-R, and to learn anything else about the player and it's likes/dislikes that you can. You may learn, for example, which brands of media it plays, and which it doesn't. Just from reading comments about a few of the Toshiba players, it seems that Toshiba is not the best brand for playing your DVDRs.

These DVDs you make; do they play OK in software players (PowerDVD and the like) on the computer?

[fluffysnurgle]

I did some more experimenting and got it to sort-of work.

It turns out that, as I suspected, the media is not the problem. Both DVD-R and DVD+RW are working. The key, strange as it may seem, is the sound. It seems that if I use no sound, or use PCM uncompressed sound, it works fine. (DVDAuthorGUI doesn't like .wav files as input so I have to use muxman, but one thing at a time here). If I use .mp2 sound, it also "works," subject to some dinking around as my dolby decoder system doesn't really get along with .mp2 audio. I don't really want to use either .mp2, which is not really spec compliant, or PCM, which takes up huge amounts of space and bitrate and doesn't work with my preferred authoring program. (Muxman's great for what it does, but I need menus and multiple titles).

Therefore the question falls: How can I make an AC3 bitstream that does the right thing? I've been using AC3Machine. Do I need to do something special to make the sound compliant? Other than making sure the input sample rate was 48K and the bitrate was set to something that looked good (256K), I didn't really do anything special. Should I use the full scale BeSweet encoder, and if so, how should I set its plethora of options?

It seems that no matter what I do, everything works on software players, curse that PC-software flexibility.