choppy playback with .avi on DVD-R

[chilledinsanity]

Hey, I'm running into a problem here. On my Xvid file that I've burned to a DVD-R, the playback will start out okay, then get choppy after a few minutes and kind of goes in and out of smooth and choppy after that. The whole movie played fine on my hard drive, which leaves me to suspect that the problem is that the DVD can't stream the data fast enough (which sounds kind of stupid) or there's something going on wrong with how the video is being processed, maybe not enough cached or something. So far I've tried Zoomplayer, WMP, and Cyberlink PowerDVD to try and play the .avi file, some worse than others, they all did the jerk effect. Also, I'm not losing sound, the sound goes by flawlessly, but the picture will stop and then jerk to keep up, I'm assuming until the next keyframe. Here are my specs:

DVD burner: Toshiba SD-R5002
DVD-ROM (used to try and verify if it was the burner causing the problem in playback): NEC 5700A
DVD media: Ritek 2x, burned at 1x speed
AVI file: 2.4 gigs Xvid with 5.1 AC3 sound

1.33ghz T-bird
512 megs DDR RAM
Windows XP
All post-processing options available turned off in playback

I'm rather stumped now. It seems to me that it's not a CPU issue, as I monitored CPU usage and it only got up to 68% when the problem started occuring. Also, the size of the window doesn't make a difference either (less data to process and display).

If it's a matter of the DVD not being able to keep up, why the hell not? If a regular movie streams out 4-7 gigs for the duration of the movie, shouldn't the drive able to handle 2.4? Anyway, any help would be appreciated

[alexnoe]

You probably have used NanDub to write that file...use AVI-Mux GUI with "rec lists" enabled. This will ensure that your player reads the AVI file in larger pieces!

Ritek 2x media does not exist. Most Ritek G03 discs can be written at 2x without POFs in Pioneer drives, but the write quality is poor, compared to 1x (many players can read it though, but nobody can promise anything).

The Toshiba SD-R 5002 misdetects Ritek (and CMC) as 2x compatible.

[chilledinsanity]

Thanks, this makes a lot of sense, I was starting to think it was the transfer speed of my drive. This solution is much cheaper! I did add the AC3 file using Nandub, I'll have to check AVI Mux out. I think if it does cache more it can do it, because I see the hard drive LED solid when it is choking on parts. I also noticed it happens in certain sections of the movie too, more complex ones visually, a rave scene for instance it will start skipping the video. I'll re-mux my movie and let you know how it goes!

You're right about the Ritek, although it does seem pretty tolerant of 2x writing speeds. I'll probably play it safe with 1x burning though. I don't care about the speed as long as I have burn proofing and can do stuff in the background.

[chilledinsanity]

Woohoo! It worked. At least the parts it was choking on work fine now and the Hard drive and DVD drive LEDs are blinking a lot less. I still have to watch the whole movie through from the DVD-R, but I think it will be okay now. The AVI-Mux did the job, thanks!