We've been using our PC with Ulead Video Studio 9 & Nero Start Smart for editing and burning our home videos. Our first test discs worked fine in our Grundig DVD player, apart from it freaking out when using fast forward or rewind. When we burned a larger file from the same movie about a month later, the DVD player won't recognise the disc but it still works fine on the PC. This is the same for anything we've tried to burn since. They won't work in other DVD players either. We haven't installed anything new on our PC that would conflict with the programs or changed any settings - the discs are the same, too. And we've tried other brands of disc to rule out incompatibility ( DVD player takes DVD-R.) and also burned through programs other than Nero with no luck.
Any clues as to what might be the problem? It's driving us nuts!!

This is a complicated problem, there are so many things that can cause this.

First thing I recommend is burning the DVD at less than maximum speed. If your media and drive are capable of 8x burn rate, try burning at 4x instead. Just because it can burn at 8x doesn't mean it's a good burn. PC DVD drives usually have much better read sensitivity than home DVD players. At 8x burn rate, the drive's laser is being whipped hard and drive makers may be using marginal power levels, ones good enough for playback on the same drive but not home DVD players.

I use a 16X Memorex and never had a problem, so far. But I've used a Lite-On LDW451 in the past that over drove the Laser diode and it slowly degraded to the point I couldn't even burn at 1x.

If that doesn't fix the problem, then it may be a Nero DVD burn setting problem. If you can get Ulead to compile your project as an image into a folder on your harddrive, then use Nero Express to burn that as a DVD-video project. For some reason, the Nero Express burns are more reliable than the straight Nero DVD-Video burns, I think because Express uses better default settings.

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Fav quote - "Experience is whatcha don't get 'till ya don't need it no more."

System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

Thanks, we'll give it a go!

Hi Crusty,

Don't know if you'll come back to this thread, but we tried burning @ 4x using Nero Express to no avail - DVD player still says 'major disc error'. Have you any other ideas for us?

Maybe your DVD-R drive is broken?

Nope, it burns OK. One of the first things we checked, actually.

I was seeing similar symptoms and found that the files created by my editing software were hugely fragmented (i.e. approx 4000 fragments per file, for each of the vob files).

I found that defragmenting after creating them, but before burning them to DVD, resolved the issue (alhtough it's a real pain having to do this verytime, and I'm not sure what's causing the fragmentation to happen as it never used to until a few weeks ago).

I also echo the comments to burn at a slower speed ... I only buy slow discs now as I always burn at 4x anyway to maximise compatibility with regular DVD players.

Hope this helps.