Frustrated

I'm in the process of putting together a dvd photo album to send to the family back home. I've done it before and it turned out quite well. So well that I've been thinking of the next one when taking pictures, documenting events to share with family, as well as for our own enjoyment. It's kind of nice to look at the pictures on tv, complete with music. I'm even including some short movies, recorded with my digital camera (we don't have a movie camera) this time.

Last time, my dvd included pictures from the day the girls and I left for our new home to the end of 2006. Since then, with new cameras and larger memory cards, we've taken a great many more pictures. I decided to do only half a year at a time, but still managed to fill the dvd. Actually, I had to pare down what I originally wanted by a lot, since it was more than a dvd could fit. Still, I got it all done and tested repeatedly on computer. Finally, I burned my first test disc.

Less than a dozen pictures into the disc, it froze. Badly. I couldn't even get back to the menu, having to eject the disc to continue. Other times, I had to power down the dvd player, since even ejecting didn't work. A few times, both ejecting and powering down by remote didn't work, and it had to be done manually! I tried going to the next chapter, skipping, fast forwarding... nothing would get me past that spot on the disc.

It occurred to me that there might simply be too much data for our rather old dvd player to handle. Since I already had misgivings about the length of the dvd (some 2 hours or more), I decided to split it into two discs. The software I'm using, Sonic, isn't the most advanced in the world, and I had to rebuilt the second disc from scratch. Still, I finally got it done. The end result was 2 discs with slightly less data than the last photo album I'd made and sent out. I burned a test copy of the first disc and tried it out...

Only to have exactly the same problem in exactly the same spot!

Not only that, but in trying to get past that spot, all sorts of weird lines and boxes started showing up on the screen.

So that got me to thinking that it was that particular chapter that was causing problems (the dvd's play fine on the computer, but my parents don't have a computer, so it's important that it works on tv). So I burned a test disc for the second half.

My God, it was painful! The dvd played, all right, but it wasn't at all smooth! The music and video stuttered frequently. After a few chapters, we had to stop watching. It was too hard on both the eyes and the ears!

So what is the problem? Is it in the photo album itself? Or is it actually our dvd player, which sometimes has issues with other dvds too, though nothing like this? Did the second disc burn badly because as it was writing, the computer was being used for other stuff?

To figure it out, I'm going to try burning the second disc again, this time making sure nothing is running in the background that shouldn't be, and disabling our internet connection to avoid auto-activity. Hopefully, that will eliminate any possible interruptions as the disc is being written.

As for the first disc, I'm going to take that first chapter out, then put it back differently in another location. If it's the chapter that's corrupting things, that should fix it.

Otherwise, I'm at a loss.


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