John wrote:
I have a project in Nero that I've been trying to burn onto a Dual
Layer DVD+R disc. So far unfortunately without success (4 new beer
mats!).

I have encoded the project and I am just burning the Video_TS and
Audio_TS using the burning Rom.

Bad Nero.... Bad Bad Naughty Nero... ;-)

John, I use lots of different tools. One of them is ImgBurn. You can
get it at http://www.videohelp.com. Use "Build" mode, point it to the
VIDEO_TS folder and select "Device" to burn a disc. Works like a
champ! Here's a Tutorial...
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/arch...er_imgburn.cfm.
So far though upon playback I always seem to have one or two titles
that have errors. It might say unexpected DVD error, unable to read
part of dvd playback might be effected etc and then it stops the video
playing. Have tested on my computers DVD drive as well as regular DVD
player so have ruled out hardware being the problem.

The best I have been able to do so far is to get the errors down so
that it is just two titles out of the 24 that have errors which are
slide shows with music towards the end of the DVD. No matter how many
times I try to sort it out though e.g. try a different music file or
export and then reimport the video to see if that helps, then next
time I have re-encoded the whole project and burning to DVD again, it
seems it is something else that then has the problem a different title
that was okay previously. So I am sceptical that it was a problem with
any of the video or audio files in the project esp after Nero has
encoded it all.

It seems really strange this, so I am thinking that either it is just
bad DL media that I am using or maybe Nero has an error when it is
encoding or burning the DVD? Surely though if it is bad DL media I
wouldn't have 4 coasters in a row? The chances of that are quite slim,
you would have at least got one good burn out of four usually even
with a bad bunch of media you have half okay half bad.

I am thinking that perhaps I will just try burning on a single layer
disc to see if that makes a difference. Unfortunately if I do that I
will either have to reduce the quality of the video files quite a lot
so they fit on the one disc, or somehow split the project in two and
have it over 2 discs. Was wondering if many people burning their own
DVDs have experienced similar problems using Dual Layer media and
found single layer more reliable?

It's been a real pain this because it takes just over 7 hours for Nero
Vision Express to encode all the files, then it takes just over 40
minutes to burn onto a blank DL DVD+R disc.

John, you really need to find out what type of video file Nero will use
without Transcoding! For instance, I use a Hauppauge WinPVR-250 (with
hardware encoder) to record programs into MPEG-2 DVD Program files using
VBR / max 6200 Mbps video, MP2 / 48 KHz / 128 Kbps / 16 bit / stereo
audio. I use MovieFactory to author the discs, with the video & audio
parameters set the same. It will assemble and burn a 2 hour movie in
about 1/2 hour -- with _no Transcoding_. Without doing like that, it
used to take about 5 hours on a 1.2 GHz Athlon machine!
My project contains quite a lot of slides shows with background music
and 4 DV video files from MiniDV camcorder. Two of the video files are
just three minutes long, one is about 30 minutes long and the other is
1 hour and 20 minutes in length.

Do you think it will make a difference if I export all the individual
titles and bring back in again so that all the effects, texts, music,
edits etc are all within the one video file and then not creating any
chapters for the different titles? I am thinking perhaps having less
individual elements making this whole project up will mean less parts
of it can go wrong?

John