The DL failure

Alright - gonna wrap up this topic for a little while because I simply give up at this point. I don't understand how I got a stable playable burn on that movie for my buddy last night and cannot do the same for the ISOs I downloaded.

Short of using the decryption method (which is used only for the ripping the test disc), I followed the same steps in CloneDVD including the "Clone" option - which performs its own reencode of the VOB set (which as far as I could tell, were identical anyway). In fact, the ending didn't suffer the mystery cut-off glitch that was in the test burn.

Sadly, as things would turn out, my concert disc still freezes at the layer change with my player unable to find the corresponding continuation on the second layer. And the rest of the disc is filled with glitches.

I got a successful (moderately) layer change in my PS2 drive so I'd like to say it's the fault of my old set-top box but that still does not explain why the test burn played fine. The fact is, the test burn and my final ISO burn, despite being on the same discs, coming from the same hardware, and created with the same process, yielded very different results - one playing very smoothly on my old Pioneer DV-333 and the other completely grinding it to a halt.