DVD Playback on Computer and Standalone-Player

Question

Hi,
Since a lot of people here author DVDs professionally I wonder how you handle the quality-subject with your customers. Generally I wonder about the differences between standalone players on one hand hand on Computers or Laptops. Different monitors and especially different DVD Software players seem to have a major influence on the quality beside the qualityloss from scaling PAL or NTSC up to computer monitor resolutions anyway.
I already had 2 customers complaining abouth the quality (always on computer-playback!). Standalone-Playback is fine, but computer-playback gives some real bad results with DVD-SP authored DVDs.
I tried tweaking some of the settings in DVD-SP and checking colorlevels/optimizing my menu graphics in Photoshop... which made it a little better. Now one computer gives OK results in fullscreen-mode, the other one blurs like **** and the third one even gives unbelievalble pixelation in some parts of the picture (seems to dislike the colour red... and its not even a full tone!).
Now with these results, how do you handle complaints of customers who get real bad results on their hard/software??
And generally when authoring DVDs, which is more important for you ... standalone-playback or Computer/Laptop-Playback. This issue seems also pretty important for designing the menus, so I wondered why I rarely read about the problem?!
Karim

Answer 1

First of all thanks a lot for the quick replies.
@theshow:
I know that every project is different... at least it should be. In our case nearly every customer wants one thing that fits all to save costs... that is content-wise as well as for the medium its delivered on. Since DVD is the new standard most customers want DVD. Unfortunately most use the DVDs on their laptops for presentation, but also want to have DVDs to hand out to customers. This way its hard to get an optimal solution.
So in my case... the problem is mainly the menus that the customer wants for interactivity and technical details beside the movie on the DVD. Until I saw those awful pixelations I thought that would be a solution.
Now if I change to another way like clips with other codecs or Flash/Director-based Menus I basically get new problems like customers missing codecs and plug-ins, incompatibility between MAC/Windows machines? So I am trading better quality/resolution for perfect handling and a standardized medium.
Do you often work with any other interactive stuff like Flash/Director or HTML-based solutions in which you include movies? Basically it sounds like DVD-Menus for interactive content are a deadend unless the HD-Standard saves it soon.
@Silal:
Yes, I experienced the problems badly and it reminded me of the awful work webdesign used to be.
I don't know what to improve on my DVD menus, I work in PAL 768*576 compostion resized to 720*576 for the aspect ratio. No fulltone colours or full whites in the menus, no serif fonts and the DVDSP-Settings to software-based rendering and a constant bitrate of 7. Comparing to other menus I am not too far off qualitywise anymore, but the computermonitor display really screws it up and I wonder how to get this message to our customer and avoid in future projects.
BTW... I saw some still menus which looked even worse on computermonitors than my first ones and it looks like motion menus turn out best. Could that be true that motion-menus turn out better in MPEG2 than plain Photoshop-stills??
Karim