Burned DVD skips frames (?) on DVD players

I recently used my EyeTV 200 to encode some video, which I then exported to iMovie, and then sent it to iDVD from iMovie. I then burned the video to a DVD using iDVD. The burned DVD plays fine on my computer, but does not play correctly on two stand-alone DVD players (one purchased several years ago and one purchased within the last year). During any significantly speedy motion in the image, the moving parts have a jerkiness to them, sort of like it is dropping frames, but there is also a sort of ghosting effect, where the person moving on-screen is seen in the current frame and last frame's position. It's very distracting, and I can't figure out how to fix it, because the file plays fine at every earlier stage in the process.

The encoding settings in EyeTV are as follows:
MPEG-2
NTSC 720x480 D1
Constant bit rate of 15.0 Mbps
GOP structure: IBP frames
Audio: 384 kbps at 48.0 kHz

The EyeTV file (8.4 GB) plays fine. Then I exported it to iMovie (which seems to be a straight conversion to DV), and it plays fine in iMovie. Then I clicked the "Create iDVD Project" button. I set up my menus, etc, in iDVD, and it plays fine there as well. iDVD is set to encode using Best Quality (the video is 1 hr. 15 min. long). I burned the project to a Maxell DVD-R 8x single-layer disc using a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-111D*. As I mentioned before, the resulting DVD plays fine using Apple's DVD Player software, but exhibits this weird skipping on both an old and a new stand-alone DVD player.

I have looked everywhere for some sort of preference setting to boost the quality of the rendering in iDVD (thinking that might be the problem), but the fact that the final product plays fine on the computer seems to suggest that that isn't the problem, but I don't know what else it could be. I have plenty of free space on my hard drive, and a dual-processor 1.25 GHz G4 should be plenty of horsepower to encode this thing.

Any insight into this situation would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

*: The Pioneer DVD burner is an after-market internal drive that I bought from MCE:

http://www.mcetech.com/dvdr16xdt-d.html

which is supposed to be 100% supported by Apple software (I think it's supposed to be the same model Apple uses for their superdrives). However, System Profiler lists it as unsupported:

PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111D:

Firmware Revision: 1.06
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Unsupported)
Profile Path: None
Cache: 2000 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW, +R DL
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media: No

But iDVD and the Finder both recognize it without any complaint (I've also used it to burn several DVD-R discs in the Finder - with no problems).



DP 1.25 GHz G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6) iLife '05

added DVD burner information
Message was edited by: elgrego

Posted on Apr 24, 2006 4:04 PM

Reply
6 replies

Apr 24, 2006 5:00 PM in response to F Shippey

EyeTV is what produced the original file. I knew that re-compression could produce problems as I moved from EyeTV to iMovie to iDVD to burned DVD, so to avoid that as much as possible, I put the settings as high as possible - that's why the EyeTV file is an 8.4 GB file for 75 minutes of video, which is a pretty large file for that amount of video.

But like I said, there is no problem with the quality of the EyeTV file, or the iMovie file, or the iDVD file. They all play beautifully. The burned DVD plays beautifully when it is played on the computer. The only problem is when I try to play the burned DVD on a stand-alone DVD player with a TV.

May 6, 2006 2:50 PM in response to F Shippey

I finally figured out the problem. The file I encoded with the EyeTV was simply too big. The first copy I made was 8.4 GB, and the second one was 2.8 GB. With the 2.8 GB file, using no special modifications to iDVD or anything else, the DVD burned and works perfectly in the same DVD players that choked on the DVD made with the 8.4 GB file. I guess the G4 simply couldn't convert the MPEG4 file to DVD-sized MPEG2 fast enough to process all the frames. Thank you for your help!

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Burned DVD skips frames (?) on DVD players

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.