Hello, I’ve run into a bit of a problem with my Farscape Season 1 DVD’s. I bought the entire box set while stationed in Korea about 2 years ago from the base exchange and viewed your product without any problem, though Season one did have questionable quality issues on some episodes.

But now it’s time to watch the series again (with my girlfriend, who I got hooked–gladly) and I’ve come across (so far) one disk that fails to play at all and another that just one episode does not play.

Please keep in mind, I keep very good care of my DVD’s and there are no scratches on them. Also, I have 4 DVD players in my house. One on the entertainment system, and 3 drives on 2 computers–none of them will play the disk in question or the bad episode. One of the computer drives that doesn’t recognize the episode and disk now in question was the one used to originaly watch the series–and all disks worked well at that time.

I have an enormous DVD collection–of which many disks get watched and rewatched on numerous occasions by myself and my friends, and even though I’ve heard of disk degradation, I’ve never experienced it. Degradation is my only suspicion.

I’ve read on forums and various websites that season 1 of Farscape has been having quality / defective DVD issues, so hopefully you will stand behind your product (which is somewhat pricey I might add–requiring a considerable amount of commitment from the customer.)

Certainly, it has 2 years since my purchase (roughly) and perhaps you will not feel obligated to assist me, but might I please remind you that people purchase these DVD’s so that they own the collection and may rewatch it at their leisure for years to come. One of the advantages of DVD over tape was to be able to do this without degrading the recording. Now, alas, I wish to rewatch it for the first time and I’ve discovered 2 bad disks (3 episodes total-so far) that are unplayable and I’m hardly into the First season.

Please please assist… your loyal fan of Farscape and Andromeda products –

Guido

I’ll be attempting to contact ADV films and see how they will stand behind their product (which sells for a considerably high price I might add for a box set…)

I’m not sure how the got in, they emptied the database and stuck an index.html file in the directory.

I’ve upgraded all my sites to the latest version of WordPress (I was still running 1.5), so we’ll see if that solves it.

My PC came with an OEM version of Cyberlink products, including PowerProducer for DVD authoring and burning. The good thing about this is program that I can make it do what I want (except that I’ll have to purchase some extra menu templates to do it properly), but it has a very tedious user interface and some strange quirks. For example, it seems to insist on reencoding mpeg2 files when burning a DVD. I’m not a wizard on this stuff, but I suspect that this is bad practice. Also, PowerDirector (the accompanying video editing software) by default changed my TV recording from 720×576 to 640×480 when I edited out the commercials. Strange. I know how to fix it now, but it took some errors to get this far.

I don’t like PowerProducer much, so I shopped around for other products. I tried TsunamiMPEG DVDAuthor Trial, but it won’t read the files that PowerDirector produces. Besides, I can’t figure out how to make a proper menu with chapters using TMPEG. I couldn’t do that with PowerProducer at first, but I learned to do it, so I could probbly learn it with this program too given enough patience. Some people seem to like it. I just don’t understand why the user interface has to be so difficult to navigate. Rightclick popup menus are too far between.

I then tried InterVideo WinDVD Creator 2 with similar results. It can read the mpeg2 files I have, but I can’t figure out how to make a decent menu.

Finally, I tried Pinnacle Studio Version 9. That program has a free trial version, but it requires me to pay for an mpeg2 codec if I am to use mpeg2 files. That means I can’t load my own files (it doesn’t read DivX files either) and I can’t test a DVD burn, as the vob format is also mpeg2. It looks like the program has potential, though. Hard to be sure.

So, the only program I found that works reasonably well is PowerProducer. But I’m not at all satisfied with it. There are programs in the range USD 250 and upwards, though, but that’s a bit expensive for home use.