The Made in Secret DVD Saga

Here’s a more in-depth description of the technical nitty gritty. We thought it might be useful to our fellow filmmakers, culture jammers and media mutineers, in case any of you ever runs into the same problem.

The disk was authored using DVD Studio Pro 4.1 on a 20″ Intel Imac, exported as a disk image (DDP) and burned using Toast Titanium 7.1. (UDF, not video.) The project is about 6.9 gigs. We don’t get any serious errors during the build or format. There is no CSS, Macrovision, or any of that stuff to complicate things. It’s all region. The only less-than-straightforward thing about the whole project is that it is dual-layer. We’ve burned several playable DL versions on my DL SuperDrive and they work fine.We don’t have access to a DLT drive, so we’re submitting the DDP files on two DVD-R’s, which the mastering house says should be no problem. However, everytime we send the disks, they get fatal errors. Here are the errors they get when they run it through Eclipse:

1) Opposite track path not valid for single layer
2) Control data and DDP layer count disagree (CTRL=1, DDP=2)
3) Control data and DDP main data length disagree
4) Invalid control data disc size
5) Invalid control data layer type

(We have the actual error logs, if anyone ever wants to look at them.)

We’ve sent them six different sets of disks, trying everything we could think of: scrapping the old build files and starting from scratch, moving the manual layer break to a different place, and exporting as DDP 2.0., DDP 2.1, and CMF. And we’ve double-checked everything we can think of to make sure the disk properties are specified correctly: DL, OTP, manual break, etc., etc. (For a full breakdown of everything we’ve tried, check out the page entitled “What we’ve tried and failed.” It’s a hoot!)

Anyway, that’s the problem in a nusthell. Got any ideas? Please, please send them our way. Once we have a solution, we’ll post it here for the generations to come.