DVD burner and beginning of copied videos choppy

[CiaW]

Hi all,

I'm not sure this is a hardware issue and it might be a combination hardware / software thing. I have some instructional DVD's that I'm copying and they're actually old video's that were turned into video's so most of the dvd's have a menu for 2 different video's (i.e. select video 1 or 2). I've managed to get a few mostly successful copies; but it appears to have been a fluke because I'm now running into the same issue no matter how I create the iso image to burn (K3B video project or K9Copy).

I can burn the iso using command-line (I'm using cdrtools / cdrecord by Joerg Schilling) or K3B and the result is the same; probably since K3B uses cdrecord. I've tried using the -pad option and that doesn't make a difference.

I have an LG DVD RW drive, and DVD write speeds are 4x, 8x or 16x so I've been using the slowest speed (4x) to burn and the beginning of the dvd is really choppy and basically useless when played on a dvd player attached to a tv. The iso plays just fine in VLC on my computer.

On a few of them I can mostly see the menu screen at the beginning of the dvd, though it's not always a clean image; and then when I select the 1st video, if it plays at all it will only play for a couple minutes and it's very choppy (sound and video is choppy) Then the video cuts out and goes back to the menu. Or it starts playing the 2nd video without going to the first one at all. The second of the 2 videos plays just fine. So I think the problem is that it's burning the beginning of the dvd too quickly or something -- but I'm using the slowest speed for the drive.

If I can figure out how to reverse the video order in K9copy I may just have 1 dvd with video 1 and 2, then another with video 2 and 1 so you can at least watch video 1. So far I've been able to burn CD's on the drive just fine. I updated the drive to the latest firmware last weekend, also (firmware dated July 2009).

Any ideas? I may try Nero under Wine, since I have a Nero cd available and see if that works any better. It's a total of 8 dvd's and I have 3 left to burn.