DVD stops playing and freezes

Use any of the following media except Memorex and TDK. Not that they won't work. They simply do not have the track record for reliable playback that these 3 brands do .....



Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden, or Maxell DVD-R.



I suggest burning a disc image to the desktop. test the image with apple's dvd player. Assuming it plays as expected, lower the burn speed to 4x or lower and use any of the 3 choices I recommended above while troubleshooting on this forum.





Message was edited by: SDMacuser

This is what he's referring to:



After the disk image is created you can mount it and play it with DVD Player. If it plays OK then you'll know the encoding was good and you can proceed to burn with Disk Utility or Toast at the slowest possible speed.

OT

This is just a personal choice but I rarely use apple's disc utility to lower the burn speed. I did in the past but not now. I usually lower the burn speed within iDvd'08 itself from the advanced menu tab like this:











That or I'll use Roxio Toast instead .....

Doesn't that only take effect when burning directly from iDVD without saving as a disk image? When burning the disk image you have to use either DU or Toast to set the minimum burn speed.

You are correct.

I'm having the same problem, and am using Memorex DVD-R. I will get the other brand tomorrow.

In the meantime, I did do the disc image to my desktop and I still have this problem. Thankfully, it is only happening for a second or two but it is on a disc I am going to play at my son's wedding. I would feel much better if I knew it wouldn't skip the sound or freeze for a couple of seconds. Any help is appreciated, the wedding is next weekend.

I'm not sure if it's possible to circumvent this slight pause or not. But I suspect you're stuck with this if you plan to use dual layer media and iDvd. Even Toast will also give you this momentary pause between layers.



The only way to avoid this that I'm aware of would be to burn to single layer media as opposed to dual layer while using an app like Roxio Toast's Fit to Dvd option.





Message was edited by: SDMacuser

Welcome to the Apple Discussions. Is your slideshow using still photos, created in iDVD and have more than 99 slides? And is the pause at the 99th slide? That is to be expected since iDVD, in order to get around the 99 slide chapter limitation (each slide is a chapter when added directly to an iDVD slideshow), it starts the chapter numbering over at 1 when it reaches the 100th slide. That is what creates the slight pause.

Using top notch media and burning at the slowest speed available as already suggested will help minimize the pause between slide 99 and 100.

If that's not what you're experiencing I will disavow any knowledge with this post and it will self delete. 🙂

Thanks for the information on the pausing between 99 & 100, that's exactly where the problem is. I just tried to do another disc image and I thought I put it on the slowest burning speed, 1X. It is still there. I did go out and get the Verbatim DVD-R, so I might try to burn it on there and see if it still happens.

Anything else I should try?

Yes. If you have over 99 slides, you may also want to consider one of these apps specifically designed for quality slideshow presentations:






http://www.boinx.com/fotomagico/overview/


http://www.boinx.com/photopresenter/overview/


http://www.lqgraphics.com/software/phototomovie.php



Good luck!

The burn speed doesn't have anything to do with creating the disk image. Also, you'll not get rid of the pause but can minimize it with the slower burn and good media. It will always be there to some degree.

As far as the third party slideshow applications that SDMacuser suggested I've used PhotoPresenter. It has over 25 animated themes and this demo page has some examples of them.