Problem burning with DVD Decrypter

[jriker1]

I convert all my AVI files to MPEG using CCE and have an AC3 audio stream for each created with a combination of steps, however the final AC3 is created using Soft Encode. I author my DVD in Scenarist and write it out to a .DVD file. I tried burning it with DVD Decrypter. All seems to go OK, however when I play it in my DVD Player I get some pixelations in places and stuttering occasionally. The original MPEG files do not seem to exhibit this. I recreated the .DVD file again and this time burned it with Roxio CD Creator 6. The problem does not seem to be there. I'm using a Sony 510 burner. Also tried a slower speed, however none of the software out there seems to allow for 1X burning if the player supports a faster burn rate. Anyone know what's going on here with the pixelation problem? Thanks.

JR

[jriker1]

Ok, guess I was wrong. The pixelated blocks and voice cut out still happened with Roxio, just in a different place. Not sure if it's the rewritable media I'm using, or the 2.4x speed, however didn't want to waste write once media to find out.

JR

[jriker1]

Ok, hopefully someone will have some wisdom to give me after this last part of the story. Sorry for continuous replying to myself, but I find new things as I go through the results. Ok,

The original AVI file does not have any pixelation blocks or audio cut outs.

The CCE converted MPEG2 video file is flawless and has no problems either.

The Audio file is Sonic Soft Encode AC3 created so that should be ok.

When I look at the mux_data folder for creating the DVD, the VOB file containing the movie shows the corruption as then so does the final CD. Originally thought it might be a media issue, however no looks like a Scenarist problem.

Anyone know what's going on here? Is something happening during the multiplexing of the video and audio? I get no errors during the Layout Editor processing of the DVD file.

Thanks.

JR

[jriker1]

Is this an unusual problem? I'm surprised no one has any input on this.

JR

[SomeJoe]

I've created several DVDs with both Maestro and Scenarist, and have never seen anything like the problem you're referring to. All muxed builds of everything I do with Maestro and Scenarist are flawless.

Must be something wrong with your system. Muxing involves high data rates to and from the hard drive, so my immediate suspicion would be your hard drive and/or disk subsystem.

Check your IDE cables (for ATA66 or higher, you must use 80-conductor cables), run a chkdsk on your drives, and make sure your case isn't overheating. If you're using SATA drives, SATA cables are particularly vulnerable to connector problems. Replace the cable(s).

To confirm a drive problem, get a 2nd or 3rd drive in your machine, and try to build the project and mux it completely on a different drive. You may have one drive that's bad. If you're using a RAID card, temporarily try to build & mux the project on a single drive that's not part of the RAID.

If you still get corruption no matter what drive you're building it on, and you're sure your cables are good, then you might start to expand your search. Might suspect the power supply, case cooling, or the motherboard itself. I doubt it's your RAM or processor, as problems would likely show up in the MPEG encoding, but it wouldn't hurt to run Memtest86.

At any rate, it sounds hardware-like to me.

[jriker1]

I'll check on the things you mentioned, but that sounds like grasping at straws so to speak. I have built a very high end system and have six Ultra Wide SCSI drives in my system, so will attempt to use a different drive, however I use the same drive for the original mpeg2 and ac3 conversions, so if I'm not seeing this problem with those, chances are it's not the drive. My system is pretty prestine so do not think there are system related issues, however I have ordered parts to build a new P4 3GHz system so time will tell on that one.

JR

[SomeJoe]

Well, I'm sure you're proud of the system you've built, and it indeed sounds very high end. But you can't ignore facts. If the same piece of software executes flawlessly on other people's systems but doesn't on yours, what does that tell you? :)

I'm not trying to be crass here, but I've built my share of systems, and whenever something is going awry I've found that more often than not it's faulty hardware. I've had bad RAM out of the box, hard drives that fail with no warning, and noisy power supplies that give no symptoms. Off the shelf stuff is randomly littered with crap, no two ways about it.

I don't have the exact specs on your system, but I'm not "grasping at straws" here. I'm giving you the best educated estimate of where to look that I can. Take that advice for whatever you think it's worth.

Not seeing the problems with the MPEG-2 and AC3 conversions is not surprising. Those operations don't even come close to the interface data rates associated with muxing. That plus the fact that you now say your disk subsystem consists of 6 UW SCSI drives ... well, if you brought this system to me to work on, your disk subsystem would be the first thing I would go over with a fine toothed comb. SCSI systems are more complex than IDE systems, and having 6 drives on there complicates matters. I would start looking at cable lengths, termination, termination power, SCSI IDs, host adapter BIOS and settings, etc.

I would suggest an additional test: Stick a blank IDE drive in the system on the motherboard IDE controller. Mux on that drive. That will tell you for sure whether the SCSI disk subsystem is the culprit or not. That test wouldn't take but an hour, assuming you have an available IDE drive.

[jriker1]

Thanks for the input. I am in the process of putting together my 3GHz system, but that will be using the same SCSI external drive cabinet. I am also building two 2.6 GHz machines with a single 160 GB IDE in each, so will try it on those. That should give me the most prestine environment to test this on. I'll let you know what I come up with.

I have seen problems in the past where if the AC3 stream was not created correctly, it wouldn't play at all on the stand alone players (about two seconds with no sound and then freeze), but would on the PC DVD drives. Now I'm almost looking at the opposite situation. I saw that when I used Besweet instead of the Sonic encoder so was skeptical if something similar to this is still going on.

JR

[jriker1]

Oh, one other thing that your comments sparked a thought. I forgot that what I was describing of the system layout and how things are working in my system is not entirely true. I do all my preparation using my SCSI hard drives to get the final MPEG2 and AC3 files, but due to space constraints, when I go to do the final authoring in Scenarist, I do all the multiplexing and VOB creation on a 100GB IDE hard drive in an external Firewire enclosure. Any thoughts on if this could cause problems? I would like to think not since I thought it was somewhat of a standard for doing video transfers. Thanks.

JR

[SomeJoe]

Originally posted by jriker1
I do all the multiplexing and VOB creation on a 100GB IDE hard drive in an external Firewire enclosure.

Anything is possible, including corruption arising from bad data transfers on the firewire (i.e. bad cable, bad power, faulty interface card, bad drive, etc.)

Since you're trying to narrow down what could be causing the problem, a PATA IDE drive on the motherboard IDE controller would be the most reliable drive to test on.

Could you come up with enough free space on your SCSI array to try to build the VOBs there? Would require 9 GB or so. Perhaps your SCSI array is clean, and the firewire drive is at fault. :eek:

[jriker1]

Ok, well that's potentially a lot of work for not. I replaced my entire computer with the new P4 3GHz system. The only thing that remains is my original SCSI card and hard drives. Since my SCSI hard drives were all FAT32, I cleared one off and reformatted it with NTFS and copied the content back. The problem still exists, however perhaps a little less irritating. Since this problem used to happen also on my IDE external Firewire hard drive, I know it's not the hard drives as the SCSI drives were not at play there. Everything resided on the IDE external drive. Now everything resides on the internal SCSI drives and same deal. The sound doesn't cut out, but I still got some pixelations on the final output with occasional stutter in the picture. I'm at a loss. Can another program import a scenarist script file to process the content there? Thanks.

JR

[jriker1]

Woohoo!!! I may be good here. I think DVD Decrypter may have been pointing to an old .DVD file that I was previously using on my Firewire drive. I have a couple more hours of looking through the video to go, but I think I'm good now. Guess I'll never know what fixed this as there are to many changes to my system involved, but at least it's working. Thanks for the help.

JR

[SomeJoe]

Glad you got it working. :)

I, for one, usually can't get any sleep if something on my computer is messed up. ;)