jerky video on DVD

Here are a seven items that can cause a dvd to stutter / play in a "jerky" fashion on a mac:




1. Having multiple applications open while also attempting to use apple's dvd player.




2. Using substandard dvd media. I recommend using Verbatim or Maxell DVD-R while troubleshooting this issue.



3. Lack of available HD space where the hard drive itself doesn't have at least 10% of the disc available on the boot volume for steady and even playback. In this scenario the HD is much too full and the computer will simply sacrifice steady and even playback in favor of maintaining vital system operations in the mac OS itself.




4. Dirt and/or dust accumulation on the dvd lens where the dvd-rom drive has a limited capacity to read / write to the media in question.



5. field order is wrong on the video editing app that was used prior to burning the DVD thru iDvd'08 (ie, FCP improper field order settings).



6. Bit rate issue/s (ie, improper encoder settings for the amount of QT playback or run time).



7. Sometimes hi speed media (8x or higher) may have issues when played on an older mac / dvd rom drive/ set top dvd player.

What is the source of your original video?

Open the file(s) in the QuickTime Player and do a WINDOW>SHOW MOVIE INSPECTOR

What video and audio formats are shown>?


F Shippey

iDVD doesn't really do HD.

For NTSC with your 16:9 file, you should have created a 854x480 file in DV/DVCPRO format out using the Quicktime option.

I'll try your suggestion on my next project once I get my MacBook Pro back.

I spent an hour and a half at the genuis bar yesterday for this problem but had the tech scratching his head. The best he came up with was doing the film in a the medium size vs. the large. Quality was quite different. When I got home I tried to burn a dvd but my DVD Rom was dead! Won't accept a disc.

Went back down this morning and Apple confirmed my DVD drive was dead. Luckly I had Apple Care and should have it back Friday! Hopefully the drive was the issue all along.

Thanks for all the input.

Had the same problem! Tried to sort it out and found something interesting: since I started preparing my videos in iMovie'08 to burn them with iDVD'08 later, I experimented with different codecs and noticed that all videos exported with iMovie'08 to MPEG-4 Video made no more "jerky" effects then playing from DVD (on iMac or standard DVD player on TV)

I had the same problem. In my case i fed iDVD with MPEG4 files from iMovie which are actually not suitable to create a DVD. DVD technology requires another codec and (i guess) iDVD has encoding-problems - which made my videos choppy/shaky.

What i did: i got myself "mpeg streamclip" (freeware, just google it), decoded the mpeg4 file to .dv (beware: you will get large files) and fed iDVD with that .dv-stream.
What happened: I got a perfect video.

I hope that works for you. Cheers