VCD playing trouble in WMP

[Double]

OK, I have a XVCD 1 disk created from the knowledge I have obtained here. I am not really new to this as I have backed up 60 - 70 movies to 1 disk VCDs but my problem is with one particular movie.

I did notice this problem before, (early in my encoding days) but I just thought it was something I did wrong. The VCD play fine in my stand alone DVD player. The .MPG file I created from TMPGEnc that is still on my hard drive plays fine in WMP 8.00.00.4477. But the problem is with other computers on older versions of WMP.

I played the movie at work .... Uh I mean some other place I go to for about 9 hours during the day. With a relatively fast PC Win NT and WMP 6.4.07.1112. Most of the movie plays OK, but there is about a 10 minute section (1h 40m - 1h 50m) that it freezes and I get this:
An error occurred while playing the file. (Error=8007045D)

I close the error message and move the slider to a part outside this 10 minute window and everything is OK.

I tried on my little laptop (333Mhz Cel 128M ram Win98SE) with WMP 6.4.07.1121 and it froze with a larger time window aprox. 25 minutes (1h 25m - 1h 50m) with the error code:
Error=8000FFFF Same thing, slide it outside that time window and plays OK.

I also have WMP 7.01.00.3055 on that same laptop it gave me an Unexpected Failure in that same 25 minute window without and error code. Same thing, slide it outside that time window and plays OK.

I played the VCD in my desktop PC with WMP 8.00.00.4477. OK no problems.

I took the original .avi file into Vdub and scaned for errors, bad frames, found none.

I re-burnt the same .MPG file with Nero (same as before) but I slowed the burn time from 12x to 4x. This new VCD plays OK in all the PCs and my standalone. I may have accidentally stumbled onto my own answer. Burn slower. Just curious if anyone has seen similar problems before. I took those error codes in microsofts site, but couldn't find any clue as to what they mean. Does the WMP 8.0xxx read the disk differently than previous versions of WMP? Do I need to burn all my movies slower? Or could the problem be in an optioning (that I could change) in the earlier versions of WMP?

Thanks
-D

[vitualis]

You just had some sectors on your CD that were difficult to read. Some of your drives could read it properly. Some could not.

Since, the video tracks on VCDs don't contain ECC, on the drives that couldn't read those sectors -- it told the OS/proggy that it had hit some unreadable sectors. WMP being "dumb", rather than trying to skip over them and continue playing, just aborted playback.

The reason why that disc was not as readable could be many fold. It could just so happen to be a subpar quality disc. Or, the particular burn speed you used with the media creates a disc that isn't as readable. If reburning the disc at a lower burn speed fixes your problem, then, you've found your solution!

Regards.

[Double]

Thanks,
So it's not the version of WMP, but the actual CD Rom instead. I guess that makes since. But I did try it on 3 different PC's at work, all identical in software and hardware, and all had the same problem at the same spot on the movie.

What is ECC? I would assume some sort of file checker. ??

-D

[vitualis]

That's right. The same spot in the movie because at that spot on the disc, it was difficult to read.

ECC = error correction codes. A normal CD-ROM has ECC so that if there are unreadble sectors, you MAY be able to still read the data correctly. S/VCDs don't have ECC on the video tracks (to boost capacity) but generally, it matters less.

Most unreadable sectors on a S/VCD will appear as no more than a glitch in the video/audio. Obviously, even if one bit is wrong on a CD-ROM, a program can be rendered unexecutable.

Regards.

[Double]

Ah, I think I see the light now, this probably has something to do with that burning Mode 1 or 2 thing I read about.
Thanks

-D

[Double]

OK, still seeing the same problem, even with burning slower. Could this be from bad frames from the source? If the .avi file has bad frames and I successfully encode it (with TMPGEnc) to MPG1 for VCD, will the .MPG have bad frames as well? Or will encoding it skip the bad frames?

I have 6 PC's and normally encode on 2 or 3 of them at the same time, move the completed movie across my wireless network to my main computer for burning. Sometimes I rip the DVD and run thru DVD2AVI on one PC and move to another for TMPGEnc, then another to burn. I dont know if that would induce "Bad frames" into the movie or not.

Thanks
-D