Encoding Hangs

[RamonaCV]

I have a 15 minute movie in MyDVD that consists of - color panel with text - movie - photos with audio background - another color panel with text - movie - more photos with audio. One-movie menu with chapter buttons. Seems pretty simple. But I cannot get it to burn to a DVD, an image file, or a folder set. It starts the encoding process then hangs. I thought I wasn't waiting long enough, but I think more than an hour for a 15 minute movie is too long for it to make no progress at all.

 

This happened on a previous video that I had with six movies, one of which I had trimmed. As soon as I removed the trimmed movie and replaced it with the untrimmed movie, encoding went along smoothly. But this movie I'm doing now has no trimmed or edited parts.

 

Any ideas on what I can do? My little holiday film is great but I can't get it onto a disk.

 

-- Ramona

[RamonaCV]

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

[gi7omy]

I never buy by 'brand' - I ask the guy behind the counter at my local supplier what he's using and get a batch of those - never failed yet

 

One thing, to be honest - I tend to use 8x discs: the difference really between 8x and 16x when it comes to the actual write process is only a couple of minutes really (and a lot cheaper in the end). I know my sig says I use an 8x drive but I've just been too lazy to update it to the ND-4570A :

[gi7omy]

If you are using hardware rendering, try using software (or vice versa)

 

Also, make sure that all running background apps are shut down during the process

 

Make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card (get them from the makers website - nVidiam ATI, etc) and also the latest DirectX from Microsoft (a new one was released yesterday)