Need some brainstorming on this one

[Stormpvp]

Ok, let me give you a quick run down on the problem that I am having. I have burned 9 compliant VCD's (well nero did not tell me they were non compliant or anything.. cept on 1 but I will get to that) with Nero 5.5. They were all encoded on fujifilm 80min CR media with my IOMEGA USB burner at 4x. Two of the VCD's were ripped from a DVD and the other 7 were from downloaded .mpgs (I prefer to download mpgs instead of avis even if they are bigger.. because the quality is usually a ton better).

All of them play superbly in my home and work computers with my Powerdvd XP software, but only 3 run correctly in my Apex 1500 stand alone unit. The other 6 have a/v sync problems, where the audio is off enough to be annoying. It's varies though on how far the sync is off.. and the audio pops from time to time as it resyncs.

As for the 3 that run correctly... the 2 VCDs off my dvd rip run beautifully. The 1 download that runs well I had to reencode with TMPGEnc because Nero said it wasn't compliant.

Here are my thoughts. First obvious answer would be that I just need to reencode the other ones with TMPGEnc, but I already deleted the source files (I am currently downloading them again.. will take awhile). As a further test, I could rip up a few dvd's to see how it goes on those. I have heard people say that they run into sync problems with their apex 1500s and am curious if it was for all of their VCDs, or just some.. and if they found a way to fix it.

Since, it takes quite a bit of time for me to download and then reencode each one, as well as doing a proper dvd rip.. I figured that I would ask around and see if anyone can give me some other ideas on how to fix the problem. It will be a day or two before I can test out my theories on it.

As a recap: I burned 9 VCDs that nero did not give an error on. All 9 play fine on my computers, but the 6 that I did not reencode with TMPGEnc have a/v sync problems on my Apex 1500.

[tigerwolf]

don't redownload, rip them back off the vcd
http://www.vcdhelp.com/convertdat.htm

then reencode them and see if that's the problem.

[Stormpvp]

Ahhh very good, when I get home I will definately do that. It will save me a day or so worth of downloading 700meg mpgs, heh.

[vitualis]

Actually, rather than reconverting MPEG files (leading to loss of quality), why don't you just try remultiplexing them first... Get your DAT files and run them through VCDGear to convert them back to ordinary MPEG (no loss of quality, takes no longer than copying the file to HDD).

Then use TMPGEnc to remultiplex them on the setting of "MPEG-1 Video-CD (non-standard)".

Regards.

[Stormpvp]

Thanks for the input on that one as well. I will try the remultiplexing after I gear the dat. The reason I wasn't thinking of going that route, was because it played fine on my computer.. figured it might be an xvcd problem with the standalone, though Apex should play about anything.

Quick question on that though, when I remultiplex under non-standard will this result in an xvcd? At the moment I am mostly working on compliant VCDs.

[Stormpvp]

Well, I geared the dat on one of my vcds that was giving me problems with pretty noticable a/v sync. I then remultiplexed then burned the resulting mpg to a new vcd. It did help the a/v sync problem some.. but it was still noticable.. more so as the movie wore on.

I then deleted the remultiplexed mpg and just plugged the geared one into TMPGEnc for a regular VCD encode, then burned that resulting mpg. I am currently watching it, and all is going well. The a/v does go out of sync every now and then ever so slightly, but it does correct itself and is not too annoying overall. I did lose some quality with the reencode, but I would honestly rather have everything sync up than have the better qual. The quality is still better than when I download an .avi and convert it to standard vcd .mpg.. Those are always too blocky/blurry for my taste.

I still need to do another dvd rip, to see how that goes.