The sides fall of on a stand-alone players, and playback jitters on one.

[Andra]

Hi all,

I've just finished burning my first DVD, but there's a problem. When I play it on my computer using PowerDVD everything looks fine, except for a little shadow effect on the buttons.

When I play it on our own stand-alone DVD-player (LG DVD4730), the trouble starts. There's about 80 pixels taken of at the left side, and the buttons kind of flicker. When I start either of the two movies, playback seems to jitter and skip. I'm not sure, but I think audio and video do that seperatly.

When I tried the DVD on two other DVD-players (Yamaha DVD-S796 and Technika DVD-1010, a very lame Technics rip-off my neighbours got for free with their vacuumcleaner(!)), the movie-playback seems to be fine. The menu and movies, however, now have about 40 pixels taken of each side.

I can't figure out what went wrong, so I'm hoping you guys can help.

Here's how I made the DVD:

I recorded my mother-in-law's hot-air-balloonflight with a miniDV camera, Canon MV3i, progressive scan, PAL since I live in Europe (the Netherlands).
I captured it in Adobe's Premiere 6.0 in a DV-PAL standard 48kHz Project.
Edited it and exported it as DV-avi, in two files (a short and a long version).
I've tried normal AVI as well, but it took for ages and looked like cr*p.

When I tried to load this in to TMPGencoder (demo) it refused. So I converted the DV-AVI's to normal AVI's using STOIK Video Converter (VideoPAK), using Indeo Video 5.11 as compressor. I did have to force VideoPAK to make the exported video files 720x576, because else they would end up 360x288.

This TMPGencoder would open, and so I imported both files to batch convert and had TMPGenc create seperate Audio and Video streams.

The audio was then converted to AC3 using BeSweet with AC3Machine as a front-end.

This and the M2V-files went in to DVDmaestro. I checked everything to make sure it was PAL (that IS 720x576, isn't it?), and tried to stay away from any difficult options.
I compiled and burnt the output using Instant CD+DVD.

I hope I didn't bore anyone to death, I'm just trying to be as complete as possible. :(

I hope someone can help.
Thanks in advance! :D

Yours,
Andra

[Monarch73]

> When I tried the DVD on two other DVD-players (Yamaha DVD-S796 and
> Technika DVD-1010, a very lame Technics rip-off my neighbours got
> for free with their vacuumcleaner(!)), the movie-playback seems to
> be fine. The menu and movies, however, now have about 40 pixels
> taken of each side.

This ain't no problem because of the low price DVD-Player. This is a problem of PAL-TVs. Every TV-screen has not visible areas at the borders. This is a normal behaviour. When you design a Screen that has to be display on a TV-Set, you have to keep in mind that there are those invisible areas at all 4 sides of the screen. The area size vary from screen to screen about 30 to 50 Pixels in width.

The flicker-effect is a nother thing you have to be aware of during design-time. All colors must not be fully saturated. Its a big NO-NO for every TV-Screen designer. e.g. a TV-ready black in RGB must not be 0-0-0 (rgb values). 10-10-10 would be more suitable. Same with white (245-245-245 is ok. 255-255-255 not) and etc.

But the thing that causes flicker the most is sharp edges. TV-Screens don't like sharp color hops. But solution is pretty easy. Paint Shop Pro has a effect filter called 'smoothen picture' which in its lowest-dedensity-settings worked for me real good. Flicker was gone without any visible loss of quality. This doesn't mean you have to use PSP. Maybe your Bitmapediting tool has such effectfilter as well.


Greetings from Germany,
Niels

[Andra]

Thanks Niels,

now I know I should redo the menu: move the title and buttons inward, and pull up the blacks a bit.

But I'm still stuck with this skipping playback on my own DVD-player. Anyone any ideas on how that happened?

Thanks in advance,
Andra

[killingspree]

just a guess: it might be caused by the dvd media you used for burning. some standalone players have problems with specific brands so you might want to try another dvd-r brand...

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