Thanks! I have: HP Pavillion Media Center m7540n; 64x2 dual core 5000+, 2.61 GHz, 2 gig ram, 320 gig hard drive, Xerox 19" LCD monitor, Nvidia GeForce 6150LE video, TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-H652L with Lightscribe.
Got the brand new DirectX - no difference as far as encoding problem.
I contacted HP to check for updated Nvidia driver, said there wasn't one, that mine (6/06) was the latest. Went to Nvidia site, found one from 11/06, downloaded that one, everything works like a charm. So what gives? I can't understand how a 7-month old video driver is too dated to run this program. But whatever, now it works.
Bottom line though is the updated driver fixed the encoding hang problem.
Note: I also found another problem -- I would only get skipping, stutters, etc., when playing my videos on my Integra CD/DVD player (a good quality, very pricey player BTW). When I played them on my computer or my cheaper, basic DVD player, no problem. Couldn't figure that one out either.
Then learned something else. I was using very cheap Office Depot DVDs (16x -R) for my practice sessions Lots of stuttering, etc., non-reliable burns. When I was finally ready to burn to my more expensive lightscribe DVDs (HP 16x), no problem at all, plays in every player we've got.
So my conclusion is that the cheap DVDs cost me about 5-6 hours of frustration.
What brand DVDs do you all like and do you have a good source for buying them?
Thanks again for all your help. I'm sure I'll bug you some more if you don't mind.
Now I'm going to give the Lightscribe stuff a go (after downloading the updated software of course).
-- Ramona