On Jun 1, 2009, at 10:13 PM, Bill Connelly wrote:
> When I playback DVDs, one in particular completely freezes up my > Yikes! at the same point. Some DVD files are choppy at first, and > "smooth out" as they playback, especially in Full Screen Mode. Some DVDs are inadvertently improperly authored. Some DVDs are intentionally improperly authored. An example of the first case is "Land of the Pharaohs" (1955), a recently released Warners title. Warners is not known for intentionally improperly authoring their DVDs. But a few do slip through. The flaws in "Pharaohs" occur in two places: about 3 minutes from the fade-in of the main titles and about 13 minutes before the fade-out of the end titles. The flaws are complete skips of about 9 minutes in each instance. The first loss is really just a lot of "fluff" about the Pharaoh himself. The second loss is essentially the entire "secret" of how the Pharaoh's pyramid was made tamper-proof, and which is the essential point of the entire screen story. What one sees is a burst of random color on the screen followed instantly by a skip to about 9 minutes later in the movie. In the case of the first skip, it is possible to manually skip backwards and resume the film at approximately the point at which the disturbance first occurred. You have to skip backwards just enough, but not too much! In the case of the second skip, it is impossible to manually skip backwards. It is just as if those 9 minutes are not on the DVD at all. I doesn't matter, in this specific case, if the manufactured DVD is attempted to be played, or a "ripped" copy of the same is attempted to be played, the flaws are in both. I guess that says a lot about how faithful the various ripping programs can be. Even worse than skips are freezes. Some set-top players are good at skipping over freezes whereas others are not. A lot depends upon the device's firmware. In the worst case, a set-top box may have to be rebooted by pulling the power plug in order to restart its firmware. In the case of DVD Player, a "Force Quit" accomplishes the same thing, but this doesn't work if the application is in full-screen mode as there are no selectable points on the screen when gets one back to the Finder and from which one can force the process to quit. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
