TyTool DVD's choppy in Sony DVD player

[grooves12]

I am using TyTool 7r10 start to finish to extract .ty streams, edit out commercials, and prepare files for burning to DVD. I am burning with Nero.

Everything is super-easy and seems to work fine. However, when playing back on 2 different Sony DVD players at home the video is choppy. It is synched fine with the audio... it just is not smooth. However, the same DVD's play fine on a Memorex DVD player my sister has.

Is there something I can do to make the files work better on the Sony's??

[jdiner]

Originally posted by grooves12

Is there something I can do to make the files work better on the Sony's??
Not particularly. The sony I saw to do some testing on didn't like the things in general. Didn't like the obddball resolution, audio at anything but perfect settings, etc...

Perhaps something can be done at some point, but figuring out what the hardware does not like is darn near impossible. I just have to change the output format a bit, but a test, play it see what happens, and repeat for what feels like forever.

I purchased 4 dvd players to try and get this far. I am not going to buy another one. So figuring out what happens on a sony to cause issues is so far out on the todo list that...

--jdiner

[grooves12]

Ok, thanks for all your hard work...

I have just one more related question... I understand how certain DVD players won't like videos that are formatted a certain way...

BUT... I haven't played with the video extraction for a while. Last time I tried it out, I used this process:

- TyStudio to extract the streams and get them converted to an .mpg.
- I then used DVDPatcher to patch the header to show video was 720x480 instead of 480x480.
- And finally used DVD Workshop to create the burnable image without re-encoding the video.

I don't remember what setting of audio trancoding was being done... if any. But, I don't beleive I was transcoding it.

....... And all this worked fine on my DVD player. Perhaps the video header patch is the key???

The only problem with that process is it was MUCH too tedious to cut out portions of the video in DVD workshop, and if I made ANY cuts within TyStudio I would lose audio synch. Anyone have any insight as to why TyStudio would take basically the same video format and it plays fine and with TyTool it is choppy??

[TRILIGHT]

As long as the Sony is from within the past couple of years, it's probably not the player. Older Sony's have problems playing DVDR/W discs but the newer ones do not. That much I can say for certain! I've found that, most of the time, when playback is choppy, it tends to have more to do with the media itself. I know you said it works fine on the other player but that doesn't mean it's necessarily good media. I've had some cheap media that did not play so well before. The only "cheap" media that I trust is Ritek. Other than that, any name brand media is usually pretty good.

The "patching trick" does not affect the playback. It is strictly used to patch the header to allow certain software to allow import of the file. I recommend you try out DVD-Lab. It is really inexpensive but powerful and does not even require you to patch anything. It will accept the file as it is. In fact, the only software I personally trust with these files is DVD-Lab and DVD Maestro.

[jdiner]

Originally posted by grooves12
The only problem with that process is it was MUCH too tedious to cut out portions of the video in DVD workshop, and if I made ANY cuts within TyStudio I would lose audio synch. Anyone have any insight as to why TyStudio would take basically the same video format and it plays fine and with TyTool it is choppy??
Hummm. Wierd. I have a few thoughts. The next release with the current mux'ing improvements might help you out then.

A certain amount of buffer space is both needed and required by the spec. I stay within this but I am at the high end of it. In practice things are fine everywhere else. But it looks like the sony might have been a bit skimpy. That type of ****iness in playback was fixed for everything else in one of the early 7rX releases. Didn't know anything was going to be that stingy. The buffer requirements are just not that large.

--jdiner

[scotte3]

I recently purchased a Sony SLV-D300P (DVD/VCR Combo Unit.) I too have noticed choppy video on some of the DVD's I've created using TyTool (7r10 and previous versions.) I have concluded that this is due to the media. I usually use Ritek DVD-R media and that has played on the Sony without fail. I have also used Maxell DVD-RW without any problems. I've burned some shows on other off-brand (cheap) media and the Sony just doesn't like it.

I did a test where I created a VOB using TyTool 7r10 and staged it to burn in Nero. I created one DVD on Ritek DVD-R media, and a second DVD on an off-brand media. The Ritek played fine in the Sony DVD player, while the off-brand media resulted in choppy video. It should also be noted that both media played fine on two different PC DVD drives using WinDVD. Thus, the media seems to be the issue.

[jdiner]

I have had a flurry of reports of this type of behaviour using the 6.X series of Nero. They apparently busted things bad for what we are doing in this release. Some version will report non-standard DVD video even though burning in UDF file mode. Not a great thing.

I still use the 5.5.10.7 beta (I believe) release and things continue to work excellently here. So consider the version issues while looking for this particular bug.

But since you mentioned it works well in another player I would expect either framing of the mpeg data (an issue for me) or media type (not something I can fix...)

--jidner

[grooves12]

That MAY be my problem... I am using Nero version 6.0.

I'll try going backwards and see what happens.

[jdiner]

Cool. Please let me know either way. If there are still problems I want to try and fix them at some point.

--jdiner

[grooves12]

I've tried it on Nero 6.0 and Nero 5.5.9.14 on two different kinds of brand name DVD-R media (TDK and Memorex.) Along with Memorex DVD-RW media, and the results are always exactly the same.

The video plays smooth for anywhere from 1.5-3 seconds and then it will have a stutter in the video and resynch. I also noticed during the intro that the skips are happening at the EXACT same points in the video, which leads me to beleive it isn't the media that is causing it.

[jdiner]

Hummm. Yeah. Sounds like it is not media. Hang onto things for just a bit longer. I have some code going in that should make things more smooth by doing even tighter decoder buffer management.

--jdiner

[Pro-289]

Might not be too informative, but you could play your video in PowerDVD and have it 'Show Information'. That way you could see at which points of the video the bitrate may spike or dip.

Maybe try to run your video through Mpeg-VCR and have it fix GOP timing issues. See if that would cure the chop from the same spot.

I think this method would better help out if you were wanting to create an SVCD which has to be at a lower video bitrate than a dtivo records at. But I guess it's information nonetheless.

[grooves12]

jdiner: Im still having problems in 8r2... was the upcoming fix you hinted at supposed to be included in this release??

[jdiner]

Originally posted by grooves12
jdiner: Im still having problems in 8r2... was the upcoming fix you hinted at supposed to be included in this release??
No. I don't know how much will really help with things as I go. I wish I had a sony player that could read the disks. But I do not.

Maybe I should borrow from Circuit City or Walmart or somewhere.A 30 day return policy can be a nice thing.

--jdiner

[jdiner]

grooves12:

What Sony players did you have troubles with?

--jdiner

[grooves12]

DVP-NS300 and DVP-F21

[carovery]

Hi

I have a sony 5 dish changer model DVD-NC615 and it does not even recognizes a dish a put in. A dish i was using is Pioneer DVD-RW 2x. First I thought it was a media problem so I used DVDxCopy to copy an original DVD to an DVD-RW and tried it on sony player and it works fine. I don't know why it does not play a DVD I created using DVDlab. I use nero 6.0 to burn a dish

A funny thing is the DVD always works very well on a cheap player like Apex, and Sinsonic. Does not matter what crap I put on, it plays just fine. Therefore, I love those no brand cheap DVD player made from China. They're rock. :D

I will try couple things to make it works on my Sony player. I will post a result if I successed. But if you can get it's working first then please post your result. Or if you have any suggestion and think it's possible to make it work please post it too so I can try for you.

Thank a lot

Caro

[jdiner]

Grooves12:

I went out and picked up a Sony DVD palyer. The 325 model. it was a close as I could find to the one you listed as having.

I haven't yet tried things on it. But I will be. If I can identify what is going wrong there should be a decent fix sometime soon.

--jdiner

[laserfan]

My head's been out of this for awhile, but I do recall when I 1st got my NP655 Sony that it was snotty/picky about "standard bitrates" and audio and such, though IIRC this was mostly an issue with SVCD discs. If you pushed the bitrate too high (above the standard, again I don't recall but for some reason 2.6mbps sticks in my head). Anyway a much-higher-than-standard video bitrate gave me stuttering too, as well as some audio I think.

It also insists on 48kHz audio for DVDs; seems that 32kHz resulted in stuttering & chipmunk audio.

In the end I've found the Sony to be great when you make discs according to "specs", less so when you push the envelope. Certainly they will not play anything you can throw at them, like some of the Chinese players & others.

[sych0]

Hmmmm I had been planning on picking up a Sony NC665. Guess I'll have to hold off on that. My other option was the Philips 727. I have a 724 but its been freezing up a lot lately.

[eastwind]

I have the Sony 615 and it works fine as long as you transcode the audio (upsample to 48 KHz). I don't think this is necessary for DirecTivo..only SA. I've played 480x480 DVDs on it with the proper audio and I don't get any black bands on the side or anything like some other brands. If you have a SA you can change the recording specs and bitrates via TiVoWeb. But the audio will still have to be processed after extraction.
ew

[sych0]

Cool. Thanks for the info eastwind. All my stuff is 48 anyway, cause if it isnt DVD Movie Factory bitches. I have changed my tivos bitrate to 720 x 480, but i do have a few older ones that were recorded and burned at 554 x 480. Im curious as to how those would display... 480 x 480 is standard for svcd but 554 isnt really standard for anything cept tivo