I purchased a Sony DRU-500A which can write any format known to man. Two days of experimentation have brought me the following pieces of knowledge:
Womble/MyDVD - When I take Replay MPEGs, edit them in Womble (without re-coding), and take them to MyDVD, it seems to recode them. I'm not sure if it's doing it for the audio and video, or just the audio as has been suggested elswhere. Regardless, I get a DVD that plays in my Sampo and life is good. EXCEPT: My shows that were originally between 500 and 650 megs are now around 1.3 gigs,which means I can't get 4 measly episodes (without commercials) on one DVD. Grrrr!!!
Womble/Spruce/Nero - I demultiplexer the files, and send them to Spruce (Spruce finds errors when it's only MPEGs). I create my menu structure and save it out. I burn it with Nero, using the DVD-ROM (UDF) format. I saw on the VCDHelp web site that it's good to do this because it lets me specify UDF 1.02 instead of 1.50, theoretically making it more compatible with DVD players. Frankly, it's not very compatible. It doesn't play on a first generation Sony or on a very recent Aiwa and Toshiba. It does play on my Sampo.
The problem is that on the Sampo, the video hesitates every 3 seconds. The audio is fine, and it's not the usual MPEG problem where there are blocks, instead, it's just a slight hesitation, and continues playing. I've played it on my PC, using PowerDVD and Windows Media player, and it plays fine there.
Does anybody have any idea what the heck is going on? I really prefer the way Spruce does menus over MyDVD, and I hate the fact that I could be getting more like 8 episodes on a DVD instead of 3, but this hesitancy thing is killing me.
If no one has any idea about what my problem is, how about a suggestion of which DVD player to get? What are you guys using with Spruce and Nero and getting good results with?
Womble/MyDVD - When I take Replay MPEGs, edit them in Womble (without re-coding), and take them to MyDVD, it seems to recode them. I'm not sure if it's doing it for the audio and video, or just the audio as has been suggested elswhere. Regardless, I get a DVD that plays in my Sampo and life is good. EXCEPT: My shows that were originally between 500 and 650 megs are now around 1.3 gigs,which means I can't get 4 measly episodes (without commercials) on one DVD. Grrrr!!!
Womble/Spruce/Nero - I demultiplexer the files, and send them to Spruce (Spruce finds errors when it's only MPEGs). I create my menu structure and save it out. I burn it with Nero, using the DVD-ROM (UDF) format. I saw on the VCDHelp web site that it's good to do this because it lets me specify UDF 1.02 instead of 1.50, theoretically making it more compatible with DVD players. Frankly, it's not very compatible. It doesn't play on a first generation Sony or on a very recent Aiwa and Toshiba. It does play on my Sampo.
The problem is that on the Sampo, the video hesitates every 3 seconds. The audio is fine, and it's not the usual MPEG problem where there are blocks, instead, it's just a slight hesitation, and continues playing. I've played it on my PC, using PowerDVD and Windows Media player, and it plays fine there.
Does anybody have any idea what the heck is going on? I really prefer the way Spruce does menus over MyDVD, and I hate the fact that I could be getting more like 8 episodes on a DVD instead of 3, but this hesitancy thing is killing me.
If no one has any idea about what my problem is, how about a suggestion of which DVD player to get? What are you guys using with Spruce and Nero and getting good results with?