#1 Burning Software

We used your StarBurn SDK in our DVD video authoring program. We have a user who says when he burns a DVD using our program the DVD only plays the first frame of video on his standalone player, then locks up. If he authors the save video to a folder and then burns it with Nero the resulting DVD plays fine in his standalone player. Also to be sure it wasn't my code causing the issue I sent him a copy of your VideoBurner.exe application and had him use it to burn the DVD. It produced the same unplayable DVD as our program. This leads me to the conclusion that there is some incompatibility between your library and this users burner/media.

Here is what I know about the user's setup... He's using 4x DVD+RW media in an Aopen dual layer DVD writer PTS2 drive. Are there any known incompatibilities with this drive? Anything else you can think of that might be causing the DVDs to play correctly when burned with Nero but fail when burned with StarBurn?

Thanks,
Dan

Unfortunately you did not provide the most important information about the issue:

1) StarBurn SDK version.

2) Hardware DVD player name/firmware revision.

3) StarBurn recording logs (did you apply DVD padding? Did you apply IFO/BUP fixes? Did you apply DVD book change? etc etc etc).

This all makes issue pinpointing nearly impossible...

We don't have any issues with the resulting burner. You may however use PHILIPS DVD-Video Verifier program to check what's wrong with the recorded DVD.

1) 7.2.20 Professional

2) Don't know, I will check with customer if it's important.

3) This was done by the customer, not in a debug environment, so I'm not sure how I would get the logs. Do your sample apps produce log files?

That being said I know that DVD Padding is enabled, and I just looked at the code and IFO/BUP patching is enabled as well. As for the DVD book type, I don't explicitly set that anywhere, so unless there is a default somewhere then that is not being changed.

To be honest I didn't realize I had IFO/BUP patching enabled. What exactly does that setting do?

Dan

1) Good.

2) This is *VERY* important.

3) Ship him debug version of the StarBurn.DLL and make produce logs. At least we'll know for sure about IFO patching & other DVD related stuff.

Book type - need to know player model. Some of them don't "eat" anything except DVD-ROMs. Nero has an option to change book type for DVD-R & DVD+R media ( ->DVD-ROM). StarBurn sets default. If we'll find it's book setting code I'll export something to control this as well.

IFO patching does change IFO files content to match the offets within UDF placement. Ask your customer to send you SOURCE and DESTINATIONs IFOs Nero recorded. Are they binary identical?

BTW, what's the name of your DVD authoring SDK?

The DVD authoring SDK is dvdlib by AuthoringWare.

Since the DVD plays, but freezes on the first frame, I don't believe it's a book type issue. If it were then the player would most likely just refuse to play the DVD altogether. That IFO patching feature however sounds suspect, so I sent my customer a build of our burner with it turned off to see if that fixes anything.

I've done lots of searching, but the IFO patching is not well documented. What exactly does it change in the IFO? What is the purpose of having it turned on? What are the disadvantages of turning it off?

Dan

IFOs have embedded offsets. The need to match the ones DVD mastering application (StarBurn) uses to place files inside UDF image. If they will not match disc will be uplayable on some of the players. Nero does IFO patching, DVD Decrypter and other re-mastering software also do.

OK the customer finally got around to trying the build with the IFO patching turned off, but no luck. Same result.

I asked about his DVD player and he says it's a "Limit DVD 9900". Also he is in the UK, so if it matters these DVDs probably contain PAL content and this is probably a region 2 player.

Any other suggestions? Is there any way we could analyze the disks to tell what's different between the Nero one the StarBurn one? What about the IFOs? If I sent you a copy of the IFOs from before burning, after burning, and from a Nero burn would you be able to tell if that's the problem?

Dan

Also I just burned a test disk with both Nero and StarBurn and checked out the book type. The Nero disk was set to DVD-ROM while the StarBurn disk was set to DVD+RW. Do you think this could be the problem? Is there anyway to change the book type in StarBurn?

Dan

In such a case I need both:

1) Logs.

2) IFOs (source, BEFORE burning and destination, AFTER burning, taken from resulting DVD).

If it's test compilation and it's not huge he could put the stuff for download somewhere.

Yes, this DEFINITELY can be a problem.

Not yet. We'll be adding book change code soon. But only after we'll be done with the UDF/Unicode version. Or I'll be nailed to the the cross in front of my office.

Any sort of estimate as to when that new version might be done?

Dan

It depends on how many requests we'll have to implement this feature (DVD book type change). I was not planning to start before late December so far.

OK i had the user send me some test files. He burned the same DVD content using Nero and StarBurn. The Nero disk plays in his standalone player, the StarBurn disk does not. He then ripped the DVDs back to ISO images using DVD Decrypter, then reburned each ISO to verify that the problem persisted. It did so he sent me a copy of each ISO file. I extracted the files from each ISO and ran a comparison check on them. The only difference was in the VTS_01_0.IFO file. I opened both in ifoedit and looked through them and the only difference I could find was that they had different values for the "Start sector od VTSM_VOBS". Could this be the problem? Could it be an error in the IFO patching mechanism? If you give me an email address I can also forward you the two ISO images so you can scan them for other possible differences.

Dan

Yes, that's what IFO patching should fix. And I still have no idea did you actually apply the patching... No info, no logs, no IFOs.