"I let the movies do the talking...they speak for themselves..."

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So I now have a Philips DVD724, and out of all my 75 Evil Angel DVDs, I can not play only one of 'em.

I will be getting a second Philips machine because hey the price is right, about $100 in stores now, and it plays 258 of my 259 DVDs, so one not playing isn't good, but 258 that do play, is good.

No I don't work for Philips, but I hear everyone saying how great Sony is, I just like people to know there are alternatives to the big "S".

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P. A. M. F.

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Since then, 2 of 3 Sony's that we have in house have been having problems with many discs, including ours and other discs. One of our Sony's, a 360, won't play anything at all now.

For those of you that are having problems with ONLY Evil Angel discs, I'm not sure at all what the problem is. For max, Flesh Hunter 3 and Once You Go Black were replicated by different companies, and we had been thinking that the old company (which replicated Flesh Hunter 3) had been the problem and that by not using them any more, we were solving the problem.

A theory that's been run by me is that because we fill our discs to the max, perhaps that causes the mastering to have to be more perfect. I'm kind of at a loss, but we're working hard to figure out what may be causing problems.

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It's a shame, because Sonys usually have a very user-friendly interface (a well-designed remote)compared to other companys', which is very important to me as a consumer.

The Philips machines seem to work really well in terms of reading all media, but they have a nightmare of a remote design. Tiny buttons, almost all the same size, practically guaranteeing you'll hit the wrong button and end up in neverland every other time you use the thing. If you don't mind this kind of interruption, it's a pretty decent buy.

Here at the office, we generally use a Sony for proofing purposes, because they seem sensitive to authoring and replication issues, and also because I don't have to look down at my hand every time I hit the remote! Believe me, if you spend enough hours examining DVDs, you'll understand why this matters. On the other hand, the Sony needs to be replaced pretty frequently.

We're aware of the playback issues people have experienced, but so far the problems are too inconsistent to point to a solution. We're working on it. In the meantime, we'd appreciate hearing any more evidence pro or con. Thanks.

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All in all, I'm happy. As for the PS2, I'd fire it out the window if I didn't play GTA3 on it.

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Tricia was very helpful to us Toshiba owners awhile back, and found out there was a firmware upgrade. I never sent my player in, but now it plays everything without a problem anyway! Conversely, my Creative Labs Encore 3 used to play everything, but now has gotten extremely picky. I can't figure it out. Perhaps the technology is just too new to blame any particular player or company.

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The problems usually take the form of MPEG “blockiness” and jerkiness that begins a significant way into the disc (halfway or further), usually deteriorating over a few minutes until the player can make no further progress and stops. Oddly, I can often re-insert the disc and go directly to a chapter past the problem and watch the rest just fine.

I own several DVD players: a Denon DVD-5000, Philips DVDR985 and Daewoo-5800, plus whatever is in various computers. The problems usually, but not always, are seen on all players.

When a CD is over-filled the production house cheats by “wrapping the spiral” too tightly (80 minute CD, etc); most players have enough engineering margin to handle such things. I’ve always assumed that when DVD discs turn out too long the compression is cranked up until it fits on a standard spiral, but maybe they cheat on the spiral density too. It’s also possible some production shops and consumer players are using too much CD-derived hardware in spite of the tighter tolerances of DVD.

In the past I’ve returned defective EA disc to the retailer until I got one that would play OK in one of the players. I assume EA’s supplier was at fault. It’s a lot harder to measure a DVD’s quality that a VHS: Tricia would probably love to hear of any DVD player that could report the BLER rate (block error) so she could check on suppliers before shipping product.

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However, when we move ahead to seamless branching (which looks like a go within the next 6 months or so), most of that will change, as we won't be duplicating the encode for the fetish menu.

We have at least one Phillips in house that we use for checking product, but no Denon on Daewoo. If I could find the "absolute" player for checking the discs, I'd buy it in a second.
I even asked John if we could buy a $45,000+ quality control check machine that professional companies use to check product. But after talking to several other people about it, we realized that with different sensitivites of players, even that wouldn't be "absolute", so spending that kind of money would only be worth it if it told us that our discs would be playable for EVERYONE.

jrv- thanks for your kind of patience.

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Mmmm... seamless branching!!! Now that will be cool--and could make the fetish menus very very cool indeed. :)

I'm glad to hear that that might become an affordable option for you in the near future!

Mike L.

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If you would like to do that for me, please either post it in the new thread I'm starting here in Tech Talk, or if you want you can email it to me.

Thanks!

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