User:Fseidel/Video-DVD creation

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Things to care about when creating Video-DVDs

There are a lot of tricky details that keep authored and burned dvds from playing in Video-DVD standalone Players.

Here I'll try to give some basic hints for often discovered problems...

So, in the meantime i managed to get my media run in really all standalone-DVD-Video-players i till now discovered... :)

This shall help you get your selfburned dvds run on as many standalone players as possible. If your medias already work in your own one and this is all you want, this is not for you ;)

Video-Sources

Video-Track

Resolutions for PAL

The following are the resolutions most players accept. But you better always use 720x576 (regardles of the aspect ratio).

1. 720x576 (best)
2. 704x576 (very rare used, sometimes makes problems)
3. 480x576 (mostly used on svcd's, but its ok)
4. 352x576 (some accept this, but i this is not good!)
5. 352x288 (mostly used on vcd's, but its also ok f. dvd)
at 25 fps

Resolutions for NTSC

1. 720x480 (best)
2. 704x480
3. 352x480
4. 352x240
at 29.97 fps (sometimes encoded as 23.976fps with "3:2-pulldown")

Audio-Track

If you got a choice (most times you have ;) ) between an mp2- and an ac3-sound-track, try to use AC3 as audio-format. At least some players still tend to have some problems playing mp2 audio-tracks in videos.

BTW: with ffmpeg comes a really good and very fast AC3-encoder (sample usage: "ffmpeg -i <inputfile.wav> -y -vn -ab 192 -acodec ac3 -ar 48000 -ac 6 <outputfile.ac3>")

Regarding the samplerate you also should prefer 48 kHz, but some or even most will also accept 44.1 kHz.

Bitrate should be below 1536 kbps (usually 192 kbps should be fine).

Video-Files

Multiplexing-Details

Authoring

UDF-Image-Creation

Directory structure of Video-DVDs

Breaking it down to the very basic you most times have/need two directories ("AUDIO_TS" and "VIDEO_TS") below the dvds root. The VIDEO_TS is the one which has to include all dvd-video stuff.

Utilization of DVD capacity

Eventhough this seems rather unimportant.. just the opposit is the fact: one of the most important things to get your media played in standalone players is that at very least 2 GByte have to be used on your media so they get accepted (especially on older players).

I know this sounds strange, but i discovered (the hard way ;) ) that this is to some degree even more important than the media brand or the used burning tool. This behaviour descends from players going nearly to the middle of the first layer for a calibration-reading of some data. So if those players don't find any data in that place (after trying some more times) they'll simply reject those medias.

How to best fill-up medias

next TODO:

Users experience on different players

In fact many hardware are don't read DVD-+R, most of the readers older than 2005 don't read without frequent freezes (even expensive ones), but there are no problems with recent (divx) ones, even very cheap :-() - less than $40. But there also some tricks getting those freezing ones run smooth ;) (of course with just using open tools ;) ).

The funny thing is that especially the expensive ones tend to this behaviour (rejecting small/low-utilized dvd's). Even some commercial burning-tools like nero have a special option for this. And as this is very very easy to reach with linux it is wise to always fill up medias, so they will play on even more players.

Should be nice to list the problematic hardware (here?).

Burning the DVD

Here the problems regard different medias and writing speed will be showed...

DVD+R(W) Media

DVD-R(W) Media

some words on the "DVD-Booktype"

Final comments

as long as this document is so far from beeing ready... you may consult me via my private mailadress frank@f-seidel.de ;)