My (picky?) Standalone doesn't like DVD-RB Menus

[wmansir]

After encoding half a dozen discs I finally tried them out on my standalone after they worked flawlessly on my PC. Here's what happens.

The screen is black and dozens of small macrobocks appear, usually along the top half of the screen. They jump around on the black background. The sound plays, although choppy at times. The buttons show up and the menu is navigatable. On some of the discs when the feature is launched it plays fine, on others it just continues with the corrupt video and choppy sound.

My player is an Apex 500. In most regards it is pretty robust, but it is important to note that this player has NEVER been able to playback DVD-RB interleaved rebuilds. The problem there is slightly different, but still has a general problem of corrupt video with random macroblocks. Since there have been very few, if any, other people reporting that error, I have assumed it is just my dvd player. Now, the menu problem could be the same thing. I have been meaning to try the few IlVu discs I have done in other players, but never really got around to it.

I've been using ProCoder, with the newly supported field based encoding active (which works with regular titles fine). For my next menu encode I will go back to CCE, although that had no effect on the IlVu issue, and I have a feeling they are related. jdobbs, I didn't keep track of the setup files for those past discs, but if you think they will be useful I could post them for my next few experiments. Also, these were probably all done with 1.7.


What I would really like to know is if anyone else is having this problem?

[setarip_old]

1) Do your original, purchased DVDs exhibit the same behaviour, as do your burned backups of them, when played on this same standalone?

2) Have you tried burning at a lower speed (e.g. 4X)?

3) Have you tried running a DVD/CD cleaning disc on your burner and your standalone? Maxell makes one that retails for approximately $10US

4) Have you tried using different/higher quality burnable media? To determine the capabilities/limitations of your specific brand and model of standalone DVD player, as well as media compatibility, go to:

www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers

5) Have you tried playing your burned backup copies on other standalones?

[wmansir]

1. Yes, they play fine. So far I'm 4 bad menus for 4, at that rate my player would be pretty useless if retails didn't work.

2. I do burn at 4X, even though I'm using 8X media I found I get better burn quality with this media at 4X.

3. I haven't cleaned it, but it plays back other backups, including non-menu content on some of the same discs with the menu problem.

4. I haven't tried other media yet. My next burn will be on different media, but I don't think this is a media issue as I have many discs on the same media that work fine, most of them having been processed by DVD-RB.

5. I only have the one standalone, so I haven't tried it yet. I probably can in the next couple of days or at least have a friend try one of them out for me when they borrow other stuff.

[jdobbs]

Are these still menus or moving backgrounds?

[jdobbs]

You know, I just thought about it.... I'm not sure field encoding should be used for menus.... hmmm... Is there any way you could try one without field encoding just to see? If you still have it on your disc, maybe you could just reencode the segments that begin with "W" and do a REBUILD. Another option might be to:

1. Do a "No Compression" PREPARE on the discs you have.
2. In another directory do a "No Compression" PREPARE on the original disc
3. Copy all the M2V files that start with a "W" from the original to the other.
4. Do a REBUILD in the first directory.

If there's a enough headroom in the sizing it might fit on a DVD-+R.

Anyone out there who knows the answer to the field encoded menu question?

[wmansir]

All of the menus are motion menus. I'm using the default settings, so any menu that is just stills probably wouldn't reach the threshold to be processed.

I don't have the project files for any of the discs I tested so I'm now doing a job with CCE. If that doesn't work, I'll try your idea of a no compression rebuild of the menus.

[Zeul]

I am not aware that field encoded should cause a problem in the playback - unless the PTS/DTS/PTM stamps are incorrect - which i doubt. As a test wmansir do a run with numenu first and then a comparison of the RB menu and the numenu version (i suggest framebased encoding to rule field encoding as the issue).
I will also do a couple of comparisons myself.

[Trahald]

i have an apex 1100w (i think) .. its newer than the 500 tho. since i just did a full terminator2 with menus etc.. i'll burn on a rw and report back... Terminator2 (ue) is my reference disk.. ive backed it up about 50 times (with various methods).. although i only burned it to -r once. hehe.

[wmansir]

Good news. The test with CCE worked. It was on a RW this time. I don't have any more of the old (-R) media I was using to burn it on, but I will try it on a +R.

Next I'm going to retry it with ProCoder, with field encoding disabled. If that works I'll try it with field encoding enabled to see if that was the cause.

[jdobbs]

That's really interesting. I'm interested to see what you find.

Good work.

[wmansir]

Even better news. It appears field based encoding is the problem. The frame based ProCoder encode worked fine, but when I enabled field based encoding it failed just like the other discs.

Thanks for pushing me in the right direction, jdobbs.

Now I have about 5 discs I have to re-encode/no-compress rebuild to fix, plus another 5 images on my computer that luckily I haven't burned yet.

[jdobbs]

Hmmm... how do you tell ProCoder to (or not to) use field-based encoding (I'm not a ProCoder expert)? Maybe I could put in some code to prevent it on menu segments.

[wmansir]

It's done with EclPro.ini. Set

Alwaysframe=0

To allow field encoding. Once allowed, I think EclPro uses field encoding for jobs where progressive=0 is set in the .ecl. You could just set progressive=1 for menu segments when using ProCoder, but I don't know if that might have other consequences.

[jdobbs]

I can probably do that pretty easy. I'll get the value just before encoding a menu segment, set it to AlwaysFrame=1 before the call, and then set it back to its previous state when complete.

[Trahald]

No problems with menu etc here with cce.. also the spot i had a problem with in an earlier dvdrb version with freeze at an ilvu transition on my apex is smooth as well.

[HKT3020_1]

Experienced something a bit wierd today, ran Matrix R1 NTSC with DVD-RB 1.70.2. This was before the update which I plan to do sometime tonite but was wondering why the buttons disappeared after 2-3 seconds on the main menu when menu encoding was disabled. Odd part is, the DVDR plays fine on my PC and the files off the hard drive run fine through PowerDVD 6.:confused:

[jdobbs]

If menu encoding is disabled... the menu is a direct copy of the original and the VTSM sections of the IFO are not changed.. You should be able to look at the file size and verify if they were copied. You should also be able to look at your log. If there is no processing of VTSM files, they were copied intact.

I just ran Matrix R1 yesterday (I've probably done that DVD 50 times in my tests) and it worked correctly on my system.

[HKT3020_1]

Well I don't know what the problem could be attributed to but after verification with ImgBurn and testing it on 4 homedeck DVD players, the menu button continues to vanish. On PCs this disc plays just fine, Verbatim DVD+R burned at 6X with Plextor 716A. As you said Jdobbs the menus were kept 100% intact and I would enjoy nothing more than to get this disc to you somehow but then again that's probably against the rules.:sly:

[Morbo]

I know on Version 1.0.7 I tried my new Dune disc.....and it FUbar'd the menu(Using HC,and.....it's a non-motion menu)......it killed the buttons but not the backgrounds.

Used CCE,worked fine......since the last update...been using HC again and no problems.

Just my .02

[jdobbs]

Can't imagine how the encoder could have made a difference. Non motion (STILL) menus aren't reencoded. The problem you saw was caused by the fact that the sequence_end_code was being stripped from the extracted still before being reintegrated into the menu and it would have happened no matter what encoder is selected. That was fixed in v1.08.

I can tell you that if you are experiencing problems with a menu and the menu encoding function is turned off, the problem has to be outside of DVD-RB -- because it just doesn't do anything to them.

[wmansir]

You know how I said field encoding worked or regular titles, well, I'm not so sure about that anymore.

I'm fixing those discs that had the menu problem. One of them (Red Dwarf Series 1 Disc 1) had the menu problem and also the regular titles would not play. I have half a dozen other discs which (I'm pretty sure) have used field based encoding and all of them play fine, so I just assumed that the problem on the menus had thrown the decoder into a loop, which was causing the regular titles to fail.

I rebuilt the disc with 1.08.1, reencoding the menus but copying the feature video uncompressed. The menu then worked fine, but titles refuse to play, exhibiting the same failure as the menus did previously. I even re-authored the disc in DVD Shrink using just the main titles and they still failed.

So I guess now I have to redo the disc from scratch, but I'm still puzzled about why it doesn't work on this disc. I'll have to do some tests where I'm sure field based is being used, like I said, I'm pretty sure it was used on those other discs, but not 100%.

[Trahald]

if you drop the demuxed mpeg2 stream into dgindex it will tell you if its field or frame based.