dvds that dont show elapsed time/chapter in display?

[sadsack]

wasnt sure where to post this question.
Occasionally I buy dvds which, when the main feature and/or extras are playing and "Display" on remote is activated, will not show the time elapsed and chapters onscreen. Stripping out the user prohibited limits doesnt help. They can be reauthored in a different program with a new menu to solve the problem, but is there a way to fix the original menu (in a copy of the dvd)? Maybe with Pgcedit?
Why does this happen?

[Mug Funky]

possibly "Time / PTT Search" is disabled and the player interprets this as "OMG i can't display the time or it'll be baaad".

i don't think this should happen though.

i've seen weirdnesses with ac3 timecode throwing things off, or time displays based on counting I-frames and assuming a GOP length. it's typically a player issue, but that's not to say peculiar authoring decisions can't expose a player oddity.

[sadsack]

I originally thought it was an authoring issue - where the video title is stored in the menu, but looking at more videos with this problem, I'm not so sure.
Happens on some Anchor Bay dvds, and with an increasing amount of the Warner Archive dvds. I've read complaints about it, so it's not just my equipment (Pioneer and Panasonic dvd player).

[Ghitulescu]

I originally thought it was an authoring issue - where the video title is stored in the menu,

That was my first idea, you were faster...

[sadsack]

so...no way to fix this by - I dunno- remapping something in Pgcedit?

[Ghitulescu]

What DVD is that?

[Emulgator]

I found some early and cheapo DVDs with this behaviour, in most cases menuless.
In some cases the main movie could not even be slider-navigated in PowerDVD.
Some PTS inconsistencies...
I thought about a poor muxing engine back then.
Sometimes it even seemed to me that renaming of .mpg PS to VOB had been attempted.
But I forgot. Moved on.

Although GOP timecode should be of no concern here:
DLP2 (free 30 day trial, then $) would offer rewriting of GOP timecode and remux properly.

ReStream 0.9.0 (free) may be of help for fixing GOP timestamps too.
Then remux using Muxman's free version 0.16?

But if newer Warner DVDs show this behaviour too, maybe MugFunky is right.