Topic: Weird Lplex or DVD problem, anyone using?

[carlbeck]

I just started using Lplex & burned two shows on some older DVD discs I had laying around. The discs are about a year old, verbatum's. The first disc has drop outs in the tracks intermitantly. I went back to the original files to confirm it isn't the files, the originals are fine. The second disc plays a song for a while & then just goes into white noise/digi static.

Weird, no clue whether it is the discs or the software?? The discs look fine. I grabbed some year old Verbatum discs I had burned last year & they play perfectly in the same player. So, it isn't the player or files. Discs or software? Looks like I need to load another burning software.

[aval57]

Hi carlbeck,

Did you try slowing down the burn? This happened to me too, and I made a nice little stack of coasters before figuring out that maybe I should try burning at 4x even though the dvds were nominally 8x, and everything was ok. They were a noname brand, though. My bad burns were like your first disk, with random dropouts.

White noise could be an encoding problem, though; If it's also present during playback of the dvd files on a software dvd player, then I'd be interested to know the details and see the Lplex.log file.

btw, for what it's worth my favorite burner is ImgBurn.

[carlbeck]

I used DVD Audiofile tonight with no problems, must have been Lplex?

[aval57]

Both Lplex and DVD Audiofile (which is a frontend for dvda-author) create the iso image using the same underlying tool: mkisofs, so it's unlikely that the iso itself is the problem.  The transcoding routines in lplex are also essentially the same as those in dvda-author/dvdaudiofile (which was the initial model I used in writing Lplex), so it's curious that you seem to be getting different results.

If you're willing to look into this a bit further, would it be possible for you to:

• Give the particulars about the input files: format, bit-depth, khz, channels.
• Open 'Lplex.log' (located in the 'something_DVD\XTRA' folder), nd see if there are any ERR or WARN messages. If (and only if) so attach the entire Lplex.log, otherwise just include the first ten lines of Lplex.log here for now.
• Check whether there's dropout/hiss in the Lplex dvd files (in the 'something_DVD' folder) when played back in windvd/powerdvd/vlc or other silmilar software dvd player.
• (Only if you find hiss in the previous step) drop the 'something_DVD' folder onto Lplex.exe again and see if the extracted audio matches the original audio.

Thanks,
Bahman

[aval57]

It occurred to me that there's also a way to eliminate the possibility of a bad burn being the problem:

• Put the hissy disc into your dvd drive, then drop the drive onto Lplex.exe to extract the audio.
• Drop the 'something_DVD' folder onto Lplex.exe likewise.

If Lplex reports md5 errors on the actual disc and not on the 'something_DVD' folder, then it's a burn problem.  To speed things up, you can also just press CTRL-C to stop Lplex after extracting only one file in both tests, but then you'll have to play/fingerprint both files manually to see if there's a difference.

[aval57]

carlbeck, one of your downloaders at digitalpanic contacted me this week with similar problems (white noise/faint music): it turned out that he had set "video=pal" in Lplex.ini and then tried to play the dvd on an ntsc-only player.  Could this have happened here too?

PS downloaded your wsp2006-09-20flac24 in the process of troubleshooting: great recording!

[carlbeck]

Thanks for the compliment.

I don't know how it was set but I started using a different program to burn with & have had no other problems.