DVD stutters on standalone player

[rling]

Hi all

I'm backing up a movie to 4.7GB DVD. After ripping I used DGIndex to index the VOBs and extract the soundtracks, I created a very simple video-only AVS (just MPEG2Source and Trim) and used QuEnc to encode.

I then used GUI for DVDAuthor (GfD) to combine the encoded .m2v with the original English AC3 5.1 soundtrack extracted by DGIndex, and generated the VOBs and IFOs.

The original movie (all streams) is over 6GB, the re-encoded movie (both streams) is a bit over 4GB which is a perfect size.

When I put this on a DVD-R (using Nero) and into my standalone player, playback stutters and the picture breaks up into bands. On Windows it also stutters slightly, as if there is a problem keeping up. A Nero disk image mounted with Daemon Tools also has (less severe) problems, so it's not the media. The VOBs produced by GfD don't stutter when played separately in Zoom Player.

The QuEnc settings were:
- Bitrate: 5000
- VBR, High Quality, 2 Pass Encoding turned on
Advanced settings:
- Max bitrate: 8000 (I chose this after experimentation, to keep the output size down)
- Scene detection, 16:9 turned on
- All other settings default.
I don't know the exact versions of QuEnc/GfD but I can look them up if it's relevant, they won't be the latest but I have used them before for DV->DVD with no problems.

How can I begin to resolve the problem? Are there tools I can download which can analyse the output VOBs and tell me what is wrong?

Could it be something to do with re-muxing the original soundtrack with the re-encoded video stream?

Thanks for any suggestions.
R.

[manolito]

Your QuEnc settings look good to me, so I suppose that you used Mplex for muxing. This is a well known source of stuttering.

I highly recommend that you use Muxman instead of Mplex. I am not familiar with GUI for DVDAuthor, but AFAIK the newer versions do support Muxman.

Cheers
manolito

[setarip_old]

@rling

Hi!

You might consider using DVD Rebuilder for this task, instead of the multistep procedure you've used here...

[rling]

Your QuEnc settings look good to me, so I suppose that you used Mplex for muxing. This is a well known source of stuttering.

I highly recommend that you use Muxman instead of Mplex. I am not familiar with GUI for DVDAuthor, but AFAIK the newer versions do support Muxman.

Cheers
manolito

Thanks! I'll give MuxMan a try and report on what happens.

I've never tried DVD Rebuilder but in this case the movie needs to be reduced by more than 30%, and my understanding is that methods that remove coefficients are only good for reductions of less than 20%.

Thanks for suggesting it though!

[setarip_old]

my understanding is that methods that remove coefficients are only good for reductions of less than 20%.When you have the time, you really should try DVD Rebuilder - It's a VERY different program than the vast majority of compression programs...

You might want to read the test results at this link:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=624299#post624299

[rling]

Your QuEnc settings look good to me, so I suppose that you used Mplex for muxing. This is a well known source of stuttering.

I highly recommend that you use Muxman instead of Mplex. I am not familiar with GUI for DVDAuthor, but AFAIK the newer versions do support Muxman.

Cheers
manolito

Thanks! That did the trick. I've set GfD to use MuxMan by default instead of mplex now.

I worked out at least one problem with mplex happened with static or nearly static scenes. This is the opposite of what I expected so using lower bit rates only made it worse.

Cheers
R