[MacDV] Help with iDVD DVD playback problems on home DVD players

[Christopher Bailey]

If this topic has been covered, sorry for the repeat (is there a
*searchable* set of archives somewhere?).

We are burning DVD's using iDVD on an iMac G5.  These DVDs play fine on our
computers (various Mac's and a Thinkpad Windows XP system).  But, they have
problems playing on regular home DVD players.  The problems are usually
"skips", meaning the movie is playing along, and then bam, you see a small
glitch and now you're anywhere from a couple of seconds, to maybe a minute
or even more ahead of where you were.  We've also seen some more minor
problems where just some small areas of the video are pixelated, or you get
a super brief skip (say 1 second or maybe less, but noticeable).  Oddly,
this can get worse as you play the DVD more.  The problems always seem to
occur in the same place on repeated plays.

Does anyone else have this problem?  I know that Apple claims iDVD creates
DVDs that play in "most" home DVD players, but we're seeing this
consistently across all sorts of players (we've tried probably 10 different
DVD players, Sony, Sherwood Newcastle, Samsung, etc.).

More details on our system:  iMac G5 with 2GB of RAM, SuperDrive, some of
the movies are burned off the internal drive, some off an external FireWire
drive.  We've tried a variety of blank DVD-R brands, Ritek, Apple, Verbatim,
etc.  We've had these problems with iMovie 4/iDVD 4/OSX 10.3.x, as well as
iMovie HD/iDVD 5/10.4.2.  We've tried both the iDVD "best quality" and "best
performance" settings.  We've also taken these same movie projects, brought
them over to my dual 2.0GHZ G5 tower system, and burned from there, and
those DVDs had problems as well, but again, only when played on a
consumer/home DVD player.