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Hello Everyone.

I recently got a complaint from a client who says one of the master copy DVD's that I sent to the duplication company had no audio. This DVD was part of a set of 8 (a 5 day lecture) from 3 years ago. I am just now hearing about the "no audio problem", which is interesting in itself

I originally checked the DVD before sending it out to the duplication company and it had audio (3 hour lecture on DL DVD). I played my master copy of the DVD and it played fine on wide screen TV with cheapo DVD player. Now I am thinking there is some problems playing the DVD on various computer media players - I used Renommee for editing and Arabesk 3.1(or 3.2) for all my DVD burning, and it always makes stable DVD's that play fine on tV sets with cheapo DVD players (Apex)

Here is the message from the guy from the DVD duplicating service from yesterday:
I did get your message yesterday but not until late as I was in meetings during the afternoon.

I was able to get to a set-top unit and test the DVD and there is audio when played. However, I tested the master's playback on 3 different computers here and got varied results.

None of the computers that used Windows Media Player seemed to be able to play the audio. Nor would the audio play using PowerDVD. However HP Quickplay WOULD play the audio, on the same machine that would NOT play it with Windows Media Player. I was not able to even play the disc at all in any of our Macs - some Macs have an incompatibility with Dual Layer media and ours are among them.

So it seems there is some incompatibility between computer playback software and this master - I am not sure that the newly supplied master will change any of that.

What format was the audio on the disc encoded in? DVD supports many formats, AC3 (Dolby Digital), Linear PCM, and then MPEGII Audio. I have seen problems with MPEGII Audio - it is not officially supported for NTSC discs, even though most players will play it. (end of message from duplication service tech guy)

Any wisdom you can impart would be appreciated.

Thanks so much!
Kim Williamson
Blue Goose Video Productions
Comfort, TX

Just got this reply from Justin at Macrosystem:

Justin: Well, on this one, I guess the straight up answer to this is to upgrade your Arabesk. To run on the newer Mac OS platform or some PC software, you'll likely need to upgrade the Arabesk version to Arabesk 4.1d or higher. This version had code placed in it to assist playback on computers and the higher Mac OS versions. Arabesk 4 will need to run with run with SE 5 or higher and require 256 MB of RAM (not a problem on the Solitaire as it already has plenty of RAM for this). At the time of its design, the older Arabesk versions wouldn't have elements in it to support computer playbacks. To order Arabesk 4 or newer OS versions you can contact our sales dept. toll free at 1-877-554-2846. They can give you a run down of current pricing. It doesn't guarantee it will help, but it most likely could help.


Additional note: The missing audio could attribute to the compression used on the DVD. If you use uncompressed you are using the PCM type of audio file. If you use "compressed" that uses the mpeg2 audio, which is some cases as he mentioned isn't supported on all playback devices.
(end of reply from Justin)

Kim