VCD Picture freezes on DVD playback

[paco]

I have made a modest collection of VCD's. Playing them in various DVD players didn't cause any problems untill now. My parents bought themselves a DVD player (RE.X SDVD 926) and it has problems with playing VCD's converted from DivX with TMPGEnc. The picture freezes at several points with different intervals. Sometimes it looks like you're playing in slow motion, and sometimes the picture will freeze for a few seconds. Audio plays normally, and after the picture resumes normal play, the sound is still in sync with the picture. I have a few VCD's who were ripped from DVD and were directly encoded to Mpeg-1. These discs play fine. I also tried SVCD (made with TMPGEnc) and this also works fine. My guess is that it has something to do with the bitrate. I have experimented with several different bitrates, but so far without any result.

suggestions anyone?

[turtle2turtle]

I have the same problem with my apex 1200.
After alot of trial and error I have found that using TMPGE you can make the video run smoothly without loosing too much of the quality.
first open settings then the GOP structure.
MAX number of frames in GOP: to 2
And turn off the Detect scene change option
That should let your video stream go through without being choppy.
but remember the video will lose a little quality, but it's not so bad.

It should look like this.

[paco]

Thanks for the tip turtle2turtle.

I just tried a sample with your suggested settings, and indeed the picture didn't freeze any more. Picture quality was less than with the original settings, but still acceptable to me. However the playback still was not as smooth as on my own player (Sony DVP-NS305), I think this might be corrected by tweaking the settings a little bit more.

Anyway, I'm on the right track.

Thanks!

[DJRumpy]

Are these VCD's that play jerky, standard VCD's (1150 Kb/sec video), and 224Kb/sec audio), or are they xVCD?

They should be CBR MPEG1, with bitrates no higher than those above, at 352x240 (ntsc) at 23.976, or 29.97 frames per second, or 352x288 (pal), and 25 frames per second.

[paco]

All my VCD's are standard compliant.
I always use the fixed template settings in TMPGEnc for either PAL or NTSC movies.
In the beginning I had problems with smoothness, because of different framerates of source avi and target mpeg file, but I figured that out some time ago, so that isn't the problem.

With my own player I don't have any playback problems, but when I play a disc at my parents', well see original post.

With the settings suggested by turtle2turtle the picture didn't freeze anymore, but the playback still was not as smooth as should be.

I must say, that I did not try this on my own player, so I can't say if it is caused by the player or the mpeg file.

I will try one on my own player soon and let you know how it plays there.