strange artifact trouble

[Marley_]

Hey guys,

I realize that I should expect some artifacts when playing an (x)vcd on a standalone, but this situation seems odd to me.

let me first tell you how I burned the cd. I used eazy cd.
I chose the options in eazy vcd to make an xvcd at the highest quality which made the bitrates mpeg-1 video- 950 kbit/s and audio - 128 kbit/s to fit everything on one disc. (roughly 6mb/minute)

For those unfamiliar w/ it, here's the process it goes through.

vstrip
dvd2avi * I should note here that I received an illegal operation error when eazy got to this stage, so i'm not sure if it went through dvd2avi, but I assume it must have since I saw that a .dv2? (video) and a .mp2 (audio) were created and encoding inside of tmpegenc.
besweet
tmpegenc
then it creates a bin/cue file from tmpegenc
done!

Also, I burned with easy vcd. (there's an "easy" theme here) ^_^
Before I burned, I had to cut the movie down a bit to 740.(something)mbs. Also, when I cut it in tmpegenc, I opened it as a Video CD (non-standard). Which is how I should treat it being that it is not the normal 1150 224, right?

Being that I read that the cd can cover a few mbs over the 740 limit, I burned this file on a 74min disc. Since the bitrates were so low, I was able to fit a 133min. movie on the disc.

Here's the deal:

The movie plays great for the first 60 min. w/ no artifacts and good quality video (probably good vhs equivalent). At about this point, minor artifacts start coming into play about once every 4 minutes. The closer the disc gets to the end, the more frequent and worse the artifacts get. By the last couple minutes, artifacts are showing up every 2-3 seconds.

Plus, what I think is odd is that the artifacts are usually never at the same place!

Now, I played the disc on my comp. and it plays beautifully w/ no artifacts.

I would also like to point out that I originally burned the mpeg and played it on the standalone....many many more artifacts.

I reduced the artifacts by alot just burning the bin file instead.

When the artifacts first start showing up, they are relatively harmless and don't truly mind them, but they do get uglier and uglier and eventually unbearable.

Any suggestions as to rid myself as to most of these artifacts?

[Abond]

Any suggestions as to rid myself as to most of these artifacts?

How they look like?

[Marley_]

like little blocks grouped together. As I get farther into watching it, the blocked groups get larger, and sometimes the blocked groupings will have a color (green I think). And a couple times when it was really bad, the block groups would be from the previous scene left over on the screen.

Any suggestions for encoding settings to help eliminate these would be very helpful.

Plus, like I said above, the disc plays perfect w/ no artifacts on my computer so I'm wondering if there are some encoding settings I can set to better configure the disc for my standalone dvd player? If that is the problem.

[Marley_]

What have other people's experience been w/ artifacts on a vcd or xvcd? How bad should I expect the artifacts to be?

[ZippyP.]

Try a different/better brand of disks.

[Marley_]

See, that's what I was kind of thinking, but it doesn't make sense to me that one disc would be better than another. A disc is a disc, right? How can they be of differing quality?

[Abond]

This error from DVD2AVI can be important. Try to open the vobs with it and save project (d2v) again. Make a little research - why the error should appear.
BTW did you make such non-standart VCD before? Maybe your player doesn't support it - therefore artifacts.
Also is it PAL or NTSC?

[ZippyP.]

See, that's what I was kind of thinking, but it doesn't make sense to me that one disc would be better than another. A disc is a disc, right? How can they be of differing quality?

No, some disks are better than others and some players like some disks and not others. This is especially true for DVD's but it can still happen with CD's. CD's are much better quality now but you can still run into some crappy ones. I have a stack of 50 that play fine in my computer and I can use them for data but my DVD player absolutely barfs on them. I would try it and see.

[ZippyP.]

The movie plays great for the first 60 min. w/ no artifacts and good quality video (probably good vhs equivalent). At about this point, minor artifacts start coming into play about once every 4 minutes. The closer the disc gets to the end, the more frequent and worse the artifacts get. By the last couple minutes, artifacts are showing up every 2-3 seconds.

The above is a classic description of a media problem, be it a VCD or DVD.

[Marley_]

Ok, I will try a diff. disc and let you know what happens.

can cd players play .wav files? I mean if I convert the mp3's to .wav and then nero would, I assume, turn the wav's into .cda, right?