I have a problem with a DVD I burned that has jerky playback on 3 different DVD Players when ever a person or object moves, the DVD plays fine on the computer for some reason though. I've reburned the DVD a couple of times but it still has the same problem. I added a seperate movie onto a DVD and the seperate movie plays fine but the original movie is still jerky.

Looks like a problem with field order. Try recoding the MPEG2 file with the field order reversed. The field order depends on the TV system (eg PAL or NTSC). The reason it plays OK on your PC is because there is no field order - PC displays are progressive. Jerky horizontal movement is almost always caused by wrong field order being played on an interlaced TV system and is a common problem in creating home DVDs. Some video cameras produce a progressive scan output (Canon MV series for example) which if captured/edited/encoded without paying attention to field order will cause the effect you describe.

So what can I use to recode the MPEG2 file with the field order reversed? Can Nero Express do it?

If what you see is herky jerky motion that is most noticable in fast horizontal movement, and barely noticable in "talking head" shots and other shots with very little horizontal movement, then I believe that:

Your Fields Are Reversed (in time).

So, they probably need to be re-reversed in time (as opposed to "swapped in position"), meaning, that you are seeing the second 60th of a second BEFORE the first 60th of a second on each frame.

Since the set top DVD player is hooked up to a device that truly displays the interlaced half frames one at a time, at two discrete points in time, issues of field order are now revealed.

A computer plays all content progressively (sequentially without skipping scanlines) and thus hides many field order issues.

For a fix there are a few methods to try:

1- First drill down to NERO's video options and try burning separately to test, the 3 methods of presenting field order: top field first, bottom first, and finally progressive. If one of these does not fix the jerkiness when played on a set top DVD player hooked up to a TV, then see #2:



2- Try an app that just resaves the same bad file but "tells it" that its field order is different. One such app is called "ReStream" (freeware).

To use this you will need to temporarily strip the audio from the MPEG-2 first (as it only works on MPEGS that do NOT have audio).

To do this use TMPEGENcode: It has a Tool section that features a DeMultiplexer - run this and you will have separated out the audio component "MP2" and the video component "M2V".

Run ReStream on the m2v and then use the same Tool section of TMPEG to Multiplex the file back together again into an MPEG-2 ("MPG").

See if this newly adjusted MPEG will now work in a NERO burned DVD-video. You may need to again experiment with the video encoding field order of NERO's burn itself at this stage (video options) as explained previously.

3. If you must you can always turn the MPEG back into an AVI and then process it in a video app such as After Effects or Premiere or similar to re-render it out as a particular field order (top/odd first or bottom/even first).
Then you can re-encode back into an MPEG-2 and see which one works in NERO. The obvious limitation of this method is the re-encoding that will cause some slight image degradation and you will have to wait for the renders.

4. If all else fails, or you're sick of dealing with the issue you can always de-interlace. This is destructive, and is really a way to toss out one of the fields and to then create a new field based upon the one that was not tossed. As you can imagine, this softens the image and can really mess with things that have delicate thin shapes such as thin text elements. For most photograpic imagery it actually isn't that bad, just a little blurry -- but all the jerkiness will definitely be gone. You will need to see at what point in your production chain you can do this. Certainly After Effects can do this to an AVI. I am unsure as to whether NERO can do this. Check it out and good luck.