Tips for burning dvd's

otb designworks

So, I recently went through all sorts of contortions to get a flythrough sequence to play on stand-alone DVD players and I figured someone might want these tips. My particular case involved a h.264 encoded .mov file. This file consisted of 6 smaller h.264 encoded sequences stitched together with a 5 sec .png still between each sequence. I was not attempting HDDVD, though that is the next experiment.

Use high quality DVD's. I started off using Memorex disks and they produced more coasters than anything useful. There is a great webpage rating and explaining DVD's here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
I ended up using Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD-R FWIW
Turn your write speed down to 2x. This takes longer to write, but quality and reliability (esp. on stand-alone players) is much better.
Close out from all your programs while actually burning the DVD.
Make sure that you are using the proper frame size for encoding! In my case, I was attempting to maintain the original size of 1024 x 768, instead of letting my software encode at the DVD default, which is 720 x 480 (NTSC). While this produced DVD's that worked on every computer I tried them on ( Mac and PC, XP and Vista), they would not work on any of the 4 players I tried them on. Once I encoded at the default, everything worked fine.

For the gory details, you can check out here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=353645&highlight=kannonbal

Hope this helps someone.

tinanne

Thanks Kannonbal! I'll be burning my first animation this weekend. {I hope!} So I'm sure this will come in handy.

otb designworks

Good luck! Hopefully these pointers will eliminate, for you, some of the hassles I went through.

dtrarch

Hi Chuck

Nice website and thx for the dvd info.
Just in time to SMA.

Dave

Shaun Tennant

Chuck - good thread. Taiyo Yuden are generally very good discs, the best media in the world is Mitsui, but they are also more expensive too.

Keep in mind as well that your computer displays more screen area of a DVD than a standard TV does - so when/if you create menus, make sure to leave a safe zone of about 8% (yes I just pulled that number out of my butt!) so that your text and graphics show on every screen.

H.264/Mov files are not the way that you would ultimately like to go, when you create a DVD, you are outputting MPEG-2 - so better to keep it in that format if possible. Do NOT push your bitrate over 8MB/s, or it will not play on all machines - better to have it around 6 or 7 so that you don't get choppy playback on some machines.

High Def. HD-DVD is not really a great idea - it is dying off, Blu-Ray is the way to go if that is really what you want to do. Best not to invest time and money into a dying format. In short HD-DVD has less capacity than Blu-Ray, the main issue though is with the data transfer rate. HD-DVD can only put out about 30MB/s of video (36MB/s total on disc) and Blu-Ray can put out 40MB/s (56MB/s total on disc) - also Blu-Ray isn't restricted on audio, and can go completely lossless - whereas HD-DVD is not as good a format for audio.

Just a bit more info.