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Wierd Apple DVD Player problems..

Wed, 2006-11-22 04:04 — Joseph

I don't know if anyone can shed any light on this but I have come across some strange behavior using the Apple DVD player.
I have recently authored a PAL and NTSC version of the same project.
The PAL version plays fine on every machine I have tested it on (software and set top boxes..) The NTSC version plays fine on all but some Macs (It seems to be mainly intel macs) It crashes (the DVD Player not the mac) whenever you try to navigate anywhere or occasionally when it reaches certain chapter points.
The strange thing is that if you are able to bypass one of the problem areas, for example at a chapter point by hitting the menu button. The next time it plays at that same chapter point it is fine. This seems to be the case with all of the problem areas.. If I can some how bypass the point at which it crashes, the next time it plays it is fine. I know that the mac creates a preference file for the dvd when it is played and if this is trashed the problems start again.. I'm not convinced it is the disc either as I copied the PAL commands in to the NTSC project in DVDAE and exactly the same problem occured. I even re-encoded the footage and again the same thing happened..

If anyone has come across anything similar or could point me in the right directon as to what might be causing this I would be very grateful..

Thanks,

Joseph.

‹ Request for assistance Resume - Weird behavior ›
Sat, 2007-01-27 08:04 — Drew

When this first came up it

When this first came up it made no sense to anyone and the DVD-R issue as you mentioned would seem to be one of the more logical/reasonable reasons and something to look at to troubleshoot

Ian's theories look interesting, but overall just a weird bug. Hopefully Apple takes care of thaat, and DVD SP 4.1, soon

Fri, 2007-01-26 18:40 — okeanos

Thanks...

I know I was jumping into the middle of this. It's just when I saw the length of the track that I started thinking in terms of maxed out DVD-Rs and/or ultra-low bit rates.

Michael

Fri, 2007-01-26 08:32 — Drew

As Ian Said

It was a DVD 9

The issue appeared when playing back on builds from the hard drive or discs under Tiger (both burned from commputer and replicated versions), plays fine on everything else.

Very strange and took a couple of more years off of my life :)

Drew

Fri, 2007-01-26 03:41 — ianshepherd

Hi Michael,Drew and I had a

Hi Michael,

Drew and I had a mammoth attempt to troubleshoot his project a month or two ago. I would point you at the original threads, but all our efforts led to red herrings in the end !

The project was a DVD-9, with a very long VTS crossing the layer-break, and several "stories" using chapters from this VTS. Iirc, Drew only saw problems in the Apple DVD Player under Tiger, not other software players or set-tops.

My guess would be a buffering issue, memory leak or similar bug in the Apple player or Quicktime MPEG-2 component.

Ian

Thu, 2007-01-25 16:53 — okeanos

5 or 9

Drew -

Is this a DVD-5 or a DVD-9?

Michael

Thu, 2007-01-25 14:22 — Drew

Actually

"NOTE this is not a problem with replicated DVDs which are made using mechanical stampers."

Actually it is a problem with the replicated discs and Apple DVD Player in Tiger

Thu, 2007-01-25 13:34 — okeanos

How full is your DVD?

The closer you get to the outside of a DVD-R (which is filled from the inside out), the less reliable the dye layer becomes. If you fill a DVD-R to the very brim you are bound to run into problems. Doubly so if you are using off-brand media and/or burning at very high speed (e.g. 16x).

NOTE this is not a problem with replicated DVDs which are made using mechanical stampers.

I guess my point is that a very full DVD-R may give you playback problems which have nothing to do with the operating system and/or playback platform.

Michael

Thu, 2007-01-25 12:50 — Drew

3 Hour 15 Minute Mark on a track Seems To Be Tiger

DVDs break up in Tiger/DVD Player seem to occur around the 3 Hour 15 Minute/17 Minute Mark or so, sounds drops, MPEG Blockiness, Counter going "crazy", Freeze Frames - I ran into this a while ago and so have some others.

Tue, 2007-01-09 16:42 — danny

found a apple-player-bug, too.

a few days ago, i finished a dvd project for a german public TV-station with one menu, a aprox. 4h long video and 10 storys.

I made a built and tested it with the apple dvd-player on 3 !! machines ( mac pro, macbook pro and G5 dual 2GHz rev.1)

all these machines got the newest OS and all updates, but they all couldn´t play these dvd correct (from the HD and the burned disk) .

at one special chapter within story 9 and the main track there was a problem while trying to skip to the next chapter. I saw the TC going on with the last picture I´v seen before pushing the button. I could skip to the next chapter but without a picture again.

another problem was, that I couldn´t start the story no. 10 from the menu.

It results into running TC ( from the film ) with menu-picture as freeze-picture.

so I tested the dvd within stand-alone,other dvd-player-software and of course afteredit-tracer, what should I say, it was fine.

strange error !!

all the best

danny

Thu, 2006-11-23 04:04 — ianshepherd

> of course that the client

> of course that the client is checking the project on a mac!

Of course :-) In which case, maybe some research about the OS-X version, Quicktime version etc. might help. In my experience if you can get it working on their machine, people usually relax. What combination are you having problems with ? And, presumably it works OK with other NTSC discs ?

Ian

Wed, 2006-11-22 09:53 — Joseph

Probably not the best turn

Probably not the best turn of phrase, all i meant was that it probably isn't anything to do with the chapter points themselves, more likely an underlying issue..
Did check the apple forums.. not much there regarding any similar problems..
I'm not too worried myself as, like you say it works everywhere else.
The problem is of course that the client is checking the project on a mac!
Of course..

Thanks again for your help..

Joseph.

Wed, 2006-11-22 09:43 — ianshepherd

Red herring ?

As I say, if the hardware players are happy with the project, I wouldn't loose too much sleep - but if it's bothering you, maybe you should send it to Trai ? http://www.dvdverification.com He has the MEI verifier, amongst others, and will probably do you a good deal as a DVDAE user :-)

Have you searched for other problems like this on the Apple forums ?

Ian

Wed, 2006-11-22 09:37 — Joseph

Thanks for that Ian,

Thanks for that Ian,
It's an odd one..
Copying to the hard drive doesn't seem to make a difference. Looked at the bit rate and all looks ok to me (Only use compressor as a last resort - is there a satisfactory mac encoding solution?)
The chapter point thing I think is a red herring as it seems to crash at every point in the disc, fast forwarding selecting the menu.... etc.
Is there a verification app that you know of that could delvce deeper in to what may be the problem?
Preferably not eclipse! ;)

Joseph.

Wed, 2006-11-22 07:11 — ianshepherd

Strange...

Hi Joseph,

I haven't heard of this one before, but certainly the Apple Player has had plenty of quirks in the past. These are complicated by the different OS-X versions, and especially the different versions of Quicktime. On the whole, if a problem only occurs on certain versions of the Apple Player and is OK in a good variety of set-top players, I wouldn't worry too much.

If you want to do more testing though, here are some troubleshooting ideas:

1 - Try some other NTSC DVDs and see if the same happens with them.

2 - Try copying the project to hard drive and see if it still does it. Sometimes certain brands of recordabe DVD "disagree" with certain drives - Superdrives, in this case. If playback from drive is clean, try a different brand or burn at a lower speed.

3 - The chapter-point thing is suspicious - was the footage encoded with Compressor ? If so, did you force chapter-points ? It may be worth taking a look with Bitrate viewer or DVDAE's birate display to see if there are very large peaks in the data rate at the problem points - I've never heard of this giving the Apple Player problems, but the move to Intel has added a whole load of new variables to the mix.

Let us know how you get on,

Cheers,

Ian

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