On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:20:10 GMT, "G Hardy"
wrote:

Yes they are definitely slideshows made up from still images not video
files.

I maybe didn't explain myself properly - I was talking about the result, not
the ingredients. A "slideshow" is a broad term covering what you're
watching, but on a DVD it has three potential meanings. The first two (still
show and slide show) are where the stills are encoded as individual frames
on to the DVD and the player "manages" the image playback. The third is
where the authoring software encodes the stills as a video, losing some of
the navigational features of a true slideshow but gaining a much nicer look.
Think of menus: A still menu uses a negligible amount of space on the DVD
but can stay onscreen indefinitely. A motion menu has to (eventually) loop
because it is a video asset that takes up space on the disc.

The mention of crossfades later in your post means your slideshows are
actually videos, just like the rest of your media assets, and should be
treated as such (just like motion menus and title sequences).


I do have crossfades between the different photos in the slideshows.
It does seem to be the background music that takes up most of the
space on the slideshows.

Not sure about that one. If you're crossfading, that suggests video, which
would take up more room than the audio. If it really is taking up less room
than the audio, perhaps you're using PCM audio, which could make DVD
playback choppy and unnecessarily use up a whole chunk of space over its
much slimmer AC3 alternative.


I might have to have a look into this. I thought that Nero Recode just
converted to MP4 format which I wouldn't really want to do because the
quality isn't as good, but if it can just recode the original files
and do a better job of that than NVE then I might give it a shot.

If it makes the end product better quality on a single layer disc I'll
give it a go and see if its good enough. I do think though that I will
probably have to get this onto a dual layer disc, or over two single
layer ones.

MPEG-4 will give better quality than MPEG-2 at the same bitrate, but that's
a moot point. What I'm suggesting is to use the first option: "Recode an
entire DVD to DVD". This will definitely result in a quality loss. Whether
it's noticeable is another matter. When it's finished analysing the disc, if
it gives you a %quality less than about 65, the loss will be noticeable.


I had already done the rounding up/down to the nearest minute

Always round up when there's an upper limit on what you're encoding, such as
the amount of space on a DVD or the maximum filesize for YouTube etc.


The Dual layer DVD disc does say 8.5GB but only 7.95GB of that appears
to show up as being usable. Same with the single layer its stated as
capacity 4.7GB but only 4.38 shows as being usable within NVE. Maybe
this is something to do with the 1000 or 1024kb in an mb issue and so
on?

That's exactly the reason. It's a bit stupid of Nero to show capacity in
binary powers (1024) while it refers to bitrate in decimal powers (1000). In
the examples I gave earlier in the thread, everything is in decimal powers.


Well, it shows as only 4.38 as being usable for me in NVE, so I guess
you can't use a full 4.7?

See above


The stutter problem was just on my system it is not a problem with the
video files just the performance of my computer.

Therein lies another possible cause of your playback problems. If your
computer isn't quick enough to keep up with MPEG playback, can it keep up
with the DVD writer? Do the two buffer gauges stay fairly stable at above
80% during writing?


Note that crossfades on stills are particularly demanding on bandwidth, so
if your slideshow has them, consider replacing them with a different
transition.

Yeah, I have used crossfades. I didn't really like any of the other
transitions, the crossfade was the best one for this project.

Agreed they are the best transition - but they are also a curse. Each frame
is, in its entirety, subtly different from the frames either side. MPEG
compression gets most of its saving from simply identifying which blocks of
the picture have moved, and identifying their new position. Where there are
new parts of the picture, there is less compression. Consider, for example,
a left-right pan shot on a tripod. As the camera moves to the right, new
bits of the picture appear on the right side of the screen and the old bits
drop off the left side.The bits in the middle just move to the left. MPEG
works (mostly) by only storing the new picture information on the right. The
bit from the middle is retrieved from an earlier frame, just with a new
position.

Crossfades bugger all that up because there are no common chunks of the
picture between frames. A low bitrate crossfade looks awful. A vbr encode at
the same bitrate will look better, but quality elsewhere will be undermined
in favour of the crossfade.

Update....

I managed to bump up the bit rate a little to 5500 and still get it to
fit on dual layer. I re-encoded the files to Hard Drive and burned to
a Verbatim DVD-R DL disc.

It plays back absolutely fine on my PC in the drive that made it
(Pioneer DVR-109), using both Windows Media Player and Nero Showtime.
However, it doesn't play back on another PC I have in that DVD drive,
and also on stand alone player attached to TV it gets to a certain
point in the main movie on the dvd and it stops working. The DVD
player makes a load of crazy spinning noises and doesn't seem to
recognise the disc anymore. If I try and select a title after the bad
bit it doesn't let me. It wont read the disc after a certain point.

It looks like if I want this to be readable in other drives then I'm
afraid dual media is a no go whether your drive supports it or not.
I'll have to fit it on a single layer disc and suffer the quality loss
or try and span it over 2 single layer DVD discs and all the problems
that will entail trying to split that.

John