VCD plays fast on DVD player, but fine everywhere else

[spleen]

Hi.

I did a search for this topic in the forums but didn't see anything specifically like this--hopefully I'm not doubling up on a popular question.

I captured some video (without audio) from camera using Winnov cap card with the following settings: 15 fps, decompressor = Winnov WNV1 Hardware Compression, compression ratio 1:1, 640x480.

The resulting file was great quality and played back with a running time of 7:03 (although the size of the file was about 456MB, but that's a concern for another post).

I converted it to VCD using TMPGEnc v2.58 at a rate of 1150. The resulting file has a running time of 7:03.

On the computer, using Windows Media Player, the VCD file (both the converted file AND the burned copy on disk) play fine and they both have a running time of 7:03.

Using a portable Koss DVP2165, playback is fine, running time is 7:03.

Here's the problem: when I play the disk on a Sony DVP-NC600 DVD player there's an obvious speed increase during playback and the running time is shortened to 6:02.

This is the first time that I've used the Winnov supplied compressor. Could that perhaps be the problem? I find this very strange that out of every possible option I have for playing this data, only ONE method results in improper speed playback.

Just thought I'd run this by you. Thanks for any help or suggestions.

dmj

[mats.hogberg]

Possibly something fishy about the frame rate conversion, from 15 to (Some valid VCD frame rate)?
/Mats

[spleen]

I thought about that, but I wasn't sure why it would only have that conversion problem with one of the DVD players.

Not that it's impossible, just not consistent.

[mats.hogberg]

Who told you there would be any kind of consitency?
Each player seems to have its own idea on what to play and not, and if at all, how it should play.
What frame rate is your VCD mpeg?

/Mats

[spleen]

29.970 fps according to VirtualDub info.

When video is opened in Virtualdub it also shows time as 7:03.

Darndest thing!

[andkiich]

That could be just what it's reading from the header info and not the actual frame rate. Idon;t know how virtualdub determines the fps. I would guess from the header info.

My guess is that some players can compensate for actual, while others probably use header info.

It's a guess on my part, but probably just as good as anyone elses.

[spleen]

Hmm...baffling, eh?

I didn't capture at 29.97 fps because it was dropping a bunch of frames (about 10%) so I just scaled it back to get some quick output.

I'll work with it a bit more, try to capture at 29.97 (or closer to it) and go from there. I would think that all players should then play it correctly.

If anyone else has any other comments I'd be glad to hear them.

Thanks.

[mats.hogberg]

One more thing - you didn't encode in CQ or VBR? That might throw play time calculations off...

/Mats

[spleen]

I used the 2-pass method. That's VBR, right? The thing is, I use 2-pass on ALL of the VCD's I author. The playback problem I'm having with this one has never been encountered before.

I'll try different compression methods when capturing the video, maybe I'll stumble onto something.

Thanks.

[mats.hogberg]

VBR isn't in the VCD standard. I think it wasn't (isn't?) even in the mpeg1 std!

/Mats

[jman98]

You didn't say what you authored the VCD with. This could be important. Nero doesn't make truly compliant VCDs if you use it to author. By "author" in Nero, I mean that you use the Nero VCD template. Nero's VCD template comes really close to being compliant, but it's not 100% there. There are some things in the directories other than MPEGAV that are not quite right. They could be off just enough to cause your Sony player to have problems. If you authored your VCD with VCDEasy, it should be compliant. It's OK to burn VCDEasy produced BIN/CUE files with Nero, by they way.

If you did VBR encoding and not CBR, that could also be the problem and the Sony player could be having problems with that. VCD only supports CBR. From your posts, it is unclear which you did.

Finally, sometimes manufacturers do odd things in their firmware that cause playback problems. In the past, all Pioneer DVD players read a field in the video stream for SVCD and used it to set the resolution to display the video at. The problem was that this field wasn't the only place in the stream to get this info and at this one particular point in the stream, anything recorded with an ATI card was wrong. It was a bug in the ATI capture software that put the wrong value in this field. All the other DVD players that supported SVCD ignored the value in this field and got the resolution info from another part of the video stream. There was nothing wrong, per se, with Pioneer's decision to read this field as it was supposed to be correct, but no one else did it. I have no idea why Pioneer alone decided to read this field, but they did. A guy in Canada had to write a patching program to fix the field for anyone who wanted to play SVCD on a Pioneer DVD player. I have no idea if ATI ever fixed their software or if Pioneer stopped reading this field in the video stream, but it just goes to show you what kinds of problems you can have. Maybe Sony is reading something in the video stream that other manufacturers ignore.