Difference in transitions on different hardware

Hi

I've been building a simple dvd in Encore cs4, and have added some transitions i made in after effects. I have two menus (chapters & contestants), that have two pages each. I have added a transition between the pages in both. On the mainmenu I have a moving background as well.

When I preview this DVD, it doesn't work at all, but after browsing around this forum, I guess the preview mode is not to be trusted.


Then I tested this on 4 different DVD-players, and practically got 5 different results. My test systems was: PS3, Toshiba HD-DVD, United DVD Player (cheap), Samsung DVD Player (decent), Pioneer DVD Player (good).

I got very different results. On some systems, the dvd goes to black for a second after each transition and after the background-video ends on the main menu, on others it freezed the last frame for a second (which is the optimal solution), on most players they freezed the transition in the contestant menus 10-15 frames before the end, and then jumped directly to the menu. Nothing smooth about that. It didn't do it on the ones that showed a black frame though.

All these inconsistencies annoy the hell out of me, but is there really anything I can do?

I also tested a DVD I made in DVD Studio Pro, which also had transitions, and got different results than from the Encore DVD on the various players.

For example I tested my Encore DVD on a PS3, and it had the black holes after transitions, but didn't have the 10-15 frames freeze. However it played the DVD Studio Pro transitions without any problems (though on the Pioneer it did show black after the transitions).

I've read about using a menu with a motion background as a transition, but is that really more efficient than using Encores built-in transition tab?

In the end I propably just have to accept, that no player will behave the same.

Unless of course you have a genius solution?

Thx