Distorted Audio when Burned to DVD

Question

Level 1

82 points

Distorted Audio when Burned to DVD

I'm having a VERY frustrating time with iDVD and it's inability to correctly keep audio un-distorted. So here I will ask a few questions.

...I've created a iDVD project with .dv clips created in iMovie. This is on a new OS install on a brand new MBP.

All audio is from the imported video... with very little editing.

The audio plays COMPLETELY fine under these situations:
-Preview in iDVD
-When Saved as disc image and mounted on local machine and played through DVD Player and VLC 0.8.5

Though when I burn to DVD, audio is garbled both on the computer and standard dvd players.

Have tried the deletion of iDVD prefs... though I do un-select the option to "show apple logo watermark" and select the "fade volume out at the end of menu loop"

I'll try with those options unchanged.

I've also tried the "save as disc image" then burn through disk utility with the exact same results.

I will also try burning at slowest speed possible.

The media I'm using is DVD+R

My question though:
WHAT CAUSES THE GARBLED AUDIO?!?!?!?! What is the technical explanation for garbled audio on a dvd burn? How could media types cause this type of issue? How could a digital transfer create garbled audio but no distortion on the video?

Thanks much... my x-mas present to friends and relatives relies on your help!

MBP 2.33 Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Dec 4, 2006 9:07 AM

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Answer 1

F Shippey

Level 7

21,500 points

Dec 4, 2006 9:20 AM in response to Ray Walker

Ray,

The audio plays COMPLETELY fine under these situations:
-When Saved as disc image and mounted on local machine and played through DVD Player and VLC 0.8.5
Though when I burn to DVD, audio is garbled both on the computer and standard dvd players.

The disk image is the EXACT data that is put on a DVD disc, so if the image plays using Apple's DVD Player application and a disc burned from that image doesn't play with Apple's DVD Player application, the problem is in the burning process.

What brand of media are you using? What is the rated burn speed? Did you reduce the burn speed when writing the image to writable media with Apple's Disk Utility? You say you are using + media; have you tried DVD-R media?

You really should try DVD-R media burned from the disk image at a low burn speed (4x or less, I prefer 2x).

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Answer 2

SDIllini

Level 6

16,675 points

Dec 4, 2006 9:53 AM in response to Ray Walker

I think the very first thing i'd try is to use Verbatim DVD-R 8x times to burn the DVD.

Not DVD+R

Sue

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Answer 3

Dec 4, 2006 12:51 PM in response to Ray Walker

I had a similar problem recently. Media used was Maxell DVD-R 16 speed burned using a Freecom external firewire DVD burner. Everything played fine in preview and also played fine from the burned disc on my Mac. When played on a standard DVD Player/Recorder (LG) I found that there were sound hiccups at the beginning and end of a transition. The disc I burned contained only still photographs arranged in around 7 slide shows.The sound was not so much distorted as interrupted albeit briefly as the photos transitioned.Am going to experiment a bit more.

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Answer 4

F Shippey

Level 7

21,500 points

Dec 4, 2006 1:04 PM in response to Mark Smyth

Media used was Maxell DVD-R 16 speed burned using a Freecom external firewire DVD burner. Everything played fine in preview and also played fine from the burned disc on my Mac. When played on a standard DVD Player/Recorder (LG) I found that there were sound hiccups at the beginning and end of a transition.

Please do not make burns at 16x!!!!!!!!! Such discs usually contain a level of burn-errors that makes them unreliable/unplayable on many set-top DVD players.

To avoid making high-speed burns, since iDVD doesn't give you a choice, create a disk image from iDVD and then use Apple's Disk Utility or Roxio's Toast Titanium 7 to burn the image to writable media at 4x or less (I prefer 2x)!

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Answer 5

Dec 5, 2006 10:15 AM in response to F Shippey

Thanks for the tip.I'll try that.

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Answer 6

Ray Walker Author

Level 1

82 points

Dec 7, 2006 2:34 PM in response to F Shippey

I've tried verbatim +r media at 4x and 2.4x both result in garbled audio. I've also tried burning via .img with no luck.

I've also tried imation -r media at 1x 2x and 4x all with the same results as well.

The issue might be related to 8bit sampling instead of 16bit sampling from the source so I tried exporting the iMovie files to quicktime to create the "16bit" this also did not help. Also note that when extracting audio from a clip, and looking at the waveform, the waveform is far from clipping where I get the overdrive audio.

This might be something related to overdriven audio from the source media, which does not distort on the computer, even when playing a burned DVD.

ACK. I've spent over $70 on this project and am coming up empty handed. :/ Thanks Apple. I think I'll consider warez-ing FCP & DVD Studio Pro so I can check and correct my audio levels (just kiddin!)

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Answer 7

F Shippey

Level 7

21,500 points

Dec 7, 2006 2:48 PM in response to Ray Walker

The issue might be related to 8bit sampling instead of 16bit sampling from the source

What was the source?

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