Burning error of the menu picture with Nero ?!

[ric1234]

Has anyone ever had this problem with Nero ?

I use Nero to quickly author SVCDs on which I put 3 episodes of my favorite soap (Friends, not to name it) and I use the "Enable Menu" feature of Nero to display a nice menu picture with the names of the episodes, etc. The episodes are encoded using dvd2svcd.

Sometimes, my SVCD would just not work. After a bit of investigation, I found that the menu picture is incomplete. I could see it with SthSDVD => the last "blocks" in the bottom right of the picture are green, like if they where missing on the disk !?! I'm pretty sure that's what makes my dv-444 refuse to read the disk.

I thought that was because I put too much data on the disk so I cut 10 MB (using TMPG) of 1 episode => still doesn't work (actually, when I searched in this direction I could see all the MPG files are all written ok on the CD)

I tried to reduce the burning speed to 4x => doesn't work

Note that I had the same pb with Verbatim CDRs and SilverCircle ones.

And sometimes, my SVCDs work perfectly using exactly the same method.

I'm so out of idea here !! If any one has an idea , it would be very welcome !

Thanks
Ric

[Blankman]

Yes, I've had the same experience using Nero. The problem seems to be random. For me, the ability to create NTSC SVCD Menus appear to break for no reason that I can easily determine.

I have also had inconsistent results trying to correct the problem.

Sometimes uninstalling and reinstalling Nero will correct the problem.

Sometimes I need to reinstall using a different version of Nero.

Nero Vision Express does not suffer from this problem. But Express doesn't support the Menu Layout I want to use. So I've finally decided to give up on Nero. I'm going to give VCDEasy (www.vcdeasy.org) a try.

[Blankman]

As I mentioned in my last message, I got fed up with Nero's inconsistent performance in generating an NTSC menu for my SVCD burns and decided to try VCDEasy.

Well I really like VCDEasy. It is a GUI packaged on top of VCDImager and a few other things. The complete package works very well. It has many more feature for burning VCDs and SVCD than Nero does. And surprisingly, I was able to use it right away.

Unlike Nero, VCDEasy simply converts a bitmap image to an MPEG still. Where as Nero (when it feels like working) merges the bitmap with other information to produce an MPEG still. So I had to use an graphics editor to prepare my bitmap editor. Any editor that will easly allow you to merge images and text together should work fine. I did it using Microsoft Visio Pro.

[ric1234]

Well, thanks for the reply, at least I know I'm not the only one having trouble with Nero.
In fact, I ended up with the exact same solution as yours, creating the menu manually and burning the image with VCDEasy.
Next time, I might try Easy CD Creator but I don't know yet if it creates menus...