The DL conspiracy continued

Well, I have my answer - this whole time Nero was apparently not burning dual-layer format correctly on my discs. I don't know what the nuances behind the problems are; the discs work just fine on PC software like PowerDVD or Interactual Player. Nobody I know has a set-top DVD player capable of playing back a Nero burned DVD-Video format DL disc.

So I decided to take turns eliminating the differences between my burns and my buddy's Serenity burn (and I in no way endorse piracy, I'm just saying, it made for a good testing situation). And the first difference was when he admitted to me that he hadn't been using Nero after all (he'd confused himself, he'd later admit). He told me to look up CloneDVD for my ISO needs.

The result: a test burn worked... sort of. Because I was adamant I would follow the example from Doom9 to the letter, I even used the "clone" command in CloneDVD to actually reencode the VOB files I previously ripped to my hard-drive. The glitch was that for whatever reason, CloneDVD's re-encode is missing a few seconds at the end of the final title (including the "goback" chapter that tells a DVD player to return to the main menu when its done).

The follow-up: I tried to burn the concert again, but this time without a re-encode. The disc is better than the Nero attempt in that it plays (more or less) in my living room. However, it has a tendency to glitch a lot with pops, freezes, and skips on the second layer to the point of being unwatchable. Hmm...