Tried everything: Burned DVDs blink, pause and/or freeze altogether.

Question

Hello there.
I live in a town in Mexico, where I volunteer screening art and foreign films for free at a non-profit cultural center. The place has a proyector and sound system, I bring everything else, coming out of my pocket.
I've been trying to show films we cannot get in Mexico, so I've mastered the technique of ripping and integrating spanish subtitles using DVDSP4. However, even as the subtitles seem to be fine, the playback has been a terrible pain in the neck.
I had a Sony DVD player, and at certain points the DVDs would blink or freeze up. I tried everything I could find out and think of, to no avail. Now I have an Oppo DVD player, and the video pauses for fractions of a second then resumes play, only to pause again a few seconds later, throughout the film.
As a test, I played a couple of straightforward 'ripped and burned' DVDs, and bingo, they play perfectly, so the error must be in something about DVDSP4. I'm using every trick in the book, firing with both barrels.
My media:
- Taiyo Yuden DVD-R, no luck.
- Verbatim DVD+R, no luck.
- Verbatim DVD+R DL, hit and miss.
For the build, I'm encoding One Pass VBR, minimun Bit Rate 4.0, maximum Bit Rate 6.4. I even tried a maximum Bit Rate of 6.0, no luck. Also, Motion Estimation either Best or Better, no luck.
I was burning on the SuperDrive Pioneer DVR-K04L, then bought an external Sony DRX-820UL-T. No luck.
I've tried Toast Titanium 6, 7 and Popcorn. No luck.
I've run Disk Utility to repair both permissions and the drive. No luck.
In a nutshell: Help!!!
A couple of thoughts:
1. Could the Tiger updates be the culprit?
2. Most of the time, the only subtitles I can find are from Spain, therefore in PAL format. I adjust the times to NTSC then integrate them to my project. Maybe this is the problem, but even if I turn off the subtitles, the problem persists.
If there's anything you can think of that might help me solve this nightmare, please let me know.
2 GHz PowerPC G5   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   1 GB DDR SDRAM

Answer 1

niktemadur
Unfortunatley what you are doing runs afoul of the Terms of Use of this Board. Even though a non-profit cultural center sounds like a good cause, doing what you are doing is copyright infringement, so people can get in trouble/kicked off here if they help. So if you do not get answers, it is not because people do not want to help or are being non-responsive
Sorry