Sonic My DVD Error msgs when burning

[culttvguy]

I have 2 problems,one with burning DVD's and one burning VCD's using Sonic My DVD

It burns DVD's,albeit very slowly,and I have no idea at what speed it burns,i only get to choose Auto.

In my PC i have a HP200i DVD burner,and i also have a Philips DVDR985 machine,both +R/W

1.
Now ,when I want to burn a TV programme/movie from my PC to the HP burner,a 1 hour video file practically fills a 4.7gig disc. I assume therefore that the burner is using the HQ mode by default.A 44 minute episode leaves about 1.6gb on the 4.7gb disc.(Although once it has been burned,there is no space visible if you look at the disc,it must use all the space)

I guess the software could be to blame,I'm not sure if it is possible to change the record time/quality setting with this PC burner even if i used different burning software,so please put me straight on that if I could do it with other burning software.

Of course,I have a way around it,I just burn a programme onto a RW disc with the PC,then play it in my Panasonic RV32 and record on my 985 at whatever quality i choose. But,I would like to do that straight through the PC burner,without having to do it twice if you see what i mean.

2.
Now to the VCD burning using the same program.
It goes through all its stages,transcoding audio and video,makes menus,imports video,writes files,etc etc,but after about 30 minutes of doing all this it gets to its final stage 'burn disc' ,and i get this error message 'Could not complete last command becasue:Could not make the disc ready for writing DVDErr:27201
And then I have no choice but to click ok,and and progress stops.I have tried different brands of disc,and used 650 and 700mb discs,all with no luck.Why is this happening.?

Would a change of software solve the problem?I know this program is only basic,it came bundled on the PC.

Any help would be great.

Andrew

[Xayd]

yeah the software is the problem. If one hour is filling a full DVD it's not compressing the video very efficiently at all.

Your best bet would be to re-encode the video and audio with TMPG (http://www.tmpgenc.net) and then burn it.

You should still be able to author the DVD with your Sonic software, so you can avoid having to buy the DVD software itself, but TMPG is a much more efficient encoder and will give much better quality than the "default" software will. Just capture at the highest quality settings you can, and throw the result into TMPG when you're done.

TMPG also has settings for SVCD and VCD so you can use it for that as well.

If you can, you might want to output the DVD files themselves to your hard drive before burning, that will give you a chance to preview the final DVD before you've burned it. PowerDVD can open the IFO files and play from your hard disk just fine. Afterwards you can burn the DVD once you've verified that it works.

As for burning your VCD/SVCD files, if the Sonic software fails just use Nero, you can give it an MPEG file and it'll compile the SVCD/VCD for you.

Nero however is NOT good for burning DVDs from my experiences, if you need alternate DVD burning software, get ImgTool 0.89 (can download from http://www.doom9.org , it's freeware) to create an ISO of your DVD, then you can burn the ISO with any burning program that you have (If you don't have another program, DVDDecrypter, also on Doom9, is freeware and works fine for burning DVD ISOs).

[culttvguy]

Thanks Xayd,Usually I extract ISO files using ISOBuster to extract the video/audio,and then attempt to burn to a DVD/VCD. Are you saying that I should burn the ISO file to the disc as it is without extracting first? Would it then play in a DVD player like a normal VCD?

Would it use the same disc space as it would if it was 'extracted' first then burned ?


Thanks
Andrew

[culttvguy]

I forgot to mention that when i try to burn a VCD with Nero,it goes through all the steps,and even tells me that it burned sucessfully,but when i eject the cd,there is nothing burned on it !!
This is a tiny bit frustrating as you can imagine !

Andrew

[Xayd]

Extracting the ISO is fine to check and make sure your files work, but it would be better to burn the original ISO when you do your "final product".

If the Sonic software is creating an ISO as it's output, you can also mount the ISO as a virtual drive with Daemon Tools to check and make sure it works (google it don't have the link handy).

That'd save you the trouble of extracting it just to check it.

[culttvguy]

Would burning the ISO use less space on the disc than if it were already extracted ??

And can it be burned to CD or DVD?

Also I dont know what is up with Nero, did a test with an episode of the Simpsons,tried to burn it to a CD,and as i mentioned above it said burn successful,but there's nothing on the disc !!

Its sapping my patience at an alarming rate!


Andrew