DVD Player hangs after a couple of mins

[tiresias]

I have just burned my first DVD which seems to play OK on my PC. But on my standalone DVD player (Cyberhome) it plays OK for maybe a minute or two and then the picture suddenly freezes. It seems the whole unit has crashed because it will not respond to any of the front panel buttons, even the open/close drawer button. I have to power it off to reset it.

I used TMPGEnc DVD Author to create the DVD files and then burned them with Nero 6.

Presumably if it plays OK on my PC then all of the IFO files must be OK.

So what is likely to be the problem? Any thoughts?

[Video Dude]

This sounds like a media problem. Did you try a different brand of disc?

Do a search and you can find out what disc brand to avoid and which disc most people like.

[tiresias]

Well, I've written a R and a RW disc and they freeze at exactly the same place if played from the beginning. If I fast forward to near the freeze point and then play it will play through it OK and freeze about 20 secs further on.

I've also tried loading the IFO into IfoEdit and chosen "get vts sectors" and re-saved the IFO files, which some say can help. But the finished disk freezes in exactly the same place.

I don't know what else I can do now.

Any suggestions?

[tiresias]

This sounds like a media problem. Did you try a different brand of disc?

Thanks for the suggestion. The the R and RW disk were both Traxdata which seem to be reported as OK with my DVD player. I don't have another brand to hand at the moment.

Having said that I've now created 3 disks which all freeze at exactly the same moment which seems to suggest that there is something wrong with the file contents, rather than a problem reading the data from a particular brand of disk which I would have expected to occur in a more random fashion.

[Video Dude]

It's unlikey the media then since if it stops at the same exact position on multiple discs.

TMPGEnc DVD Author can also burn DVDs. Perhaps try that instead of using Nero and see it you experience the same problem.

[tiresias]

I've now tried burning in DVD Author and guess what? The player freezes in the same place!

Perhaps there is something wrong with the actual MPEG2 stream which I created with TMPGEnc. Is there a strict checking utility available?

I may give CCE a try.

[tiresias]

The problem seems to be with DVD Author. I took the same MPEG/AC3 files and authored them with the demo version of DVD Lab and it plays fine on my DVD player - no freezes.

However DVD Lab seems extremely unstable. Numerous times it hangs when trying to fill the list of files in the Save Project dialog box. Also the preview window often remains blank and clicking on it gives a "not enough memory" error which is clearly rubbish as I have a LOT of ram and it was the only program running. Also occasionally the whole app would vanish. It was quite a feat to get it to author a disk.