I know this topic is covered all over this board but I can't find the Answe

Question

I burned a DVD using DVDSP 4.0 but it plays on almost nothing and the ones it plays on it stticks and sputters and pixalates. I have an old G-4 733 tower 1 gig ram and I compressed a 2 hour 15 min show using Compressor two pass VRB and Dolby 2.0 audio. (Took only about 36 hours to encode) The disk said it burned fine. When I try it in the simulation mode it works fine. The burner is one of apples first super drives. I am using blank Verbatim DVDs. It even sticks in my Mac's burner. Plays somewaht in my desk top DVD burner. Doesn't play at all in any of my desk top players, Pioneer, Toshiba, Sharp, GE, Panosonic, Sanyo. All bought with in the last two years. Two 250 gig fire wire drives but a brand New 120 gig internal HD and that has all the media I used on that drive. The MPG2 file was exported from a FCP4 project to compressor.

Answer 1

Actually, the (anecdotal) evidence suggests that when burning your project, use a max of 7.4MBPS for the video and ALWAYS encode the audio to AC3. If you choose not to encode the audio, and end up using .aiff format, you are adding over 1.5MBPS to the combined bitrate for the disc.
DVDs have a ceiling of 9.8MBPS for the video on a replicated disc, and 10.08MBPS for all assets combined. When using a writeable format this has to be lowered because the discs are just not as reflective and players will choke on the data throughput as they cannot read the information from the disc so effectively.
Even at 7.4MBPS some players can struggle, especially with .aiff audio. However, encoding to AC3 at 192Kbps really does help improve the playback quality on a wide range of players, and therefore helps improve overall compatibility.
You should also avoid using paper labels on your discs. Use inkjet printables by all means, but avoid sticking paper to the disc!
Finally, use the best quality disc you can get, and burn it slowly. You cannot adjust the burn speed within DVDSP, but by using Toast you can... build to a disc image on your hard drive and use Toast to burn that. Slower burns make for more compatible discs.