Burned Video Dvd Crashed In Windows Only

[darthmaximus]

Good Evening,

 

I've been using Toast 10 Titanium for years.

 

Most recently I've been producing a 26 week class on DVD for a senior project. I'm having a very weird problem with the last few DVDs burned that I am having trouble pinpointing.

 

Each video is edited and mastered in Final Cut on my Macbook (every video has been created and edited the same way). I export as a basic quicktime file fully rendered. In Toast, I create a new video DVD with 2 button main menu for 2 videos each week. I burn the DVD with automatic settings. I double check the masters on my Mac before duplicating on a 1:1 duplicator to send copies off to the people who need to review them. Two of the last 3 DVDs failed on their end (They claim "crashed halfway through the first video, couldn't start the second video"). They are running an unknown version of windows using an unknown program to play the DVD. All masters worked fine on my end running Mac OSX. The one point of reference I have is that I got a hold of the last one to fail and tried it on my work computer (XP Pro running VLC). It worked fine for me but did fail on another windows computer.

 

I have this pinpointed as a driver/software update issue. But does anyone know any setting that may have changed on my end that could do anything like this? Without being able to reproduce the problem, I want to fully check my own equipment before burning the final 3 DVDs.

 

For reference, of 26 DVDs: 23 are burned, all are checked on my end, 18 have been checked on their end, 2 have had issues (from the most recent submission). I have had 0 luck getting system specs or even software identity from the people I am submitting to.

 

Thanks,

Ed

[tsantee]

I don't know what to suggest that you probably haven't already considered. Because a few discs play on some but not all devices and other discs play on everything, my focus is on the discs themselves. Are you burning at the slowest available setting? If not, after inserting a blank disc choose the burn speed. I don't recall if Toast only shows available burn speeds after the disc is recognized or whether it just shows those speeds in bold face, but that's when to choose the speed.

 

Is there a different Mac or optical drive you can use to burn the DVDs?

 

Do the crashes always happen at the same point on a disc? If you knew that you could watch to see if the video has any visual problem at that point when played on a player that is able to play it all the way through.

 

I can't think of anything you can do with Toast's settings other than the burn speed that will make any difference. You can choose Save as Disc Image and then burn the resulting .toast file to DVD using the Image File setting in the Copy window. I don't know why that would make a difference but it is something to try.

[darthmaximus]

Thanks for the thoughts. I do appreciate insight from someone more familiar with Toast than I am.

 

I had not thought about the disc question. I did pull from two stashes for this submission. There could have been both +r and -r in the stack of duplicates. At this point labels have been put on and I don't have access to anything but the masters which were all +r.

 

I'll double check the burn speed on my next video burn and make sure it is slow.

 

The claim is that it always crashes "in the middle." But then they told me a slide number that it crashed on (talking head next to powerpoint slides) and it was 27 minutes into a 30 minute movie, so I don't have good data on where it crashes.

 

My reburnt masters worked perfectly created in the same manner from the same resources (I didn't htink to go to my .toast backups).

 

Thanks for your thoughts, I appreciate your time and likely chalk this one up to an issue on the user end (or at least an unidentifiable one)...