Posted by duffytweedy on 04/25/06 15:58

A few weeks ago I bought a Panasonic DMR-ES10 recorder, and have been
moving my VHS home movies onto DVD-R steadily. Most of the DVDs I've
recorded work fine everywhere, but not always. Sometimes the DVD plays
fine in every home deck I try it in, but crashes every computer DVD
player I try it in, Windows or Mac. It'll start playing but then
freeze the program within five minutes, and I get messages like "DVD
Player has encountered a problem. The disk may be dirty or damaged.
The program will now close" or, "Media Player has encountered an error
and will now close". My main reason for wanting to be able to read
DVDs on my computer is to easily burn copies, but I'm also concerned in
general about the DVDs I'm recording. I'm using the highest quality
Taiyo Yuden DVD-R disks, by the way. Are computer DVD drives just
more sensitive and picky than home players?

One particular tape is causing me headaches. I have an old, cheap VHS
tape that's a copy of an old, cheap VHS tape that was itself recorded
from 1960s Super8 tape. So my VHS looks and sounds pretty bad. I've
tried several times to record it to DVD, and each time it plays in
decks but not on any computer. Odd coincidence? Or, and here I may be
sounding dumb, could there be source material (crummy VHS) that is so
poor that the DVD recorded from it is loopy and it giving sensitive DVD
drives fits? Can the quality of the source possibly matter?

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