VCD Freezes at my Standalone Player

[keckrodrigues]

Hi to you all.
I'm quite nervous about that. I've just bought a Standalone DVD Player few weeks ago, and I tested a lot of kinds of Video CDs in it (SVCD, VCD - By the way, when I bought the Player, I had the information that it would support everything).
But, I've realized that the videos I had converted into VCD with TmpegENC (always following this sites guides and tips), don't play quite well on this player. And it's only the ones I convert; I have already tested other VCDs, not made my be, obviously, and they worked pretty good.
The problem is this: I begin to watch the video at the player, but then, it's randomly starts to freeze. Sometimes it takes minutes to freeze, somtimes just a few seconds. The image freeze while the audio keep going for about 2 seconds. Then it's also stops. The only way to begin watching is to push fast forward. Then it's all come back to normal, but a few seconds it gets all freezed again. Can anyone help me? I'm really, really nervous about that. Specially cause it's a new player and I don't know what to do. And cause I'm also a newbie at VCD world.

[mats.hogberg]

Bad media or too high burn speed. Try lowering your burn speed to lowest possible for your writer and see what happens.

/Mats

[keckrodrigues]

mats.hogberg, I've already did it ... I've even tried other burning device on my computer and still nothing change. Lower speed, diferent media, diferents types of CD-RWs ... nothing ...
And to solve the doubt of media and burning issues, I've just borrowed from a friend one video, already fitted to burn as VCD, and burn here in my PC, and it worked well!!! I believe it's a convetion issue or something.
Anyway, thanks from your help. Can anyone else say other thing?
Maybe, show me what is the right configuration of Tmpeg, or another program that can convert a file to VCD.

[mats.hogberg]

OK, so it's the mpeg that's the culprit then? Did you use the standard VCD template (NTSC/PAL) when encoding?
What is your source material?

/Mats

[keckrodrigues]

I'm specifically using some videos captured from TV.
Yeah I did use one of thoses Tmpeg Templates.
I believe taht the problem it's located at the conversion. I guess I'm doing somrething wrong. And what do you mean about "culprit"? I ask you to pardon me, but I'm not very good in english. Thanks again, Eric.

[mats.hogberg]

n : someone who perpetrates wrongdoing

Yes, It's somewhere in the conversion. Since you're using a VCD tempate in TMPGEnc, and TMPGEnc produces very compliant VCD mpegs, it's either your capture that suffers from bad frames or something, or your authoring process is wrong somehow.
In what format is your capture?
What do you use to author your mpeg to VCD?

/Mats

[reboot]

Run the video through VirtualDub beforehand. It's usually fairly good at finding corrupt frames, which you can edit out. Use the finished avi to convert to mpeg and you should be OK.
An alternative is to use a "video fixer" such as the one at www.fixvideo.com I have used with mixed results.

[keckrodrigues]

By the way I'm not the one who capture the videos. I got some friends that capture ... usually they capture some soap operas episodes (pretty popular here in Brazil) and soccer games.
I do believe that it's not a problem of corrupted frames, cause I've even tried it with some downloaded videos. After the convertion same problem.

When you mean author you mean the program I use to burn? Actually I'm using VCDEasy. I used to make it with Nero (where I used to get the same problem).

Do you guys know any configuration of Tmpeg that I can be misundertanding? Is there a walk-thru use guide? With all steps to follow?

Thanks, Eric.

[mats.hogberg]

OK, VCDEasy is the best, so that's not your problem either.
If you're using the VCD wizard in TMPGEnc you can't go wrong when encoding for VCD - Just select your input file, and click away OK thru the wiz. There's nothing more to it.

I do believe that it's not a problem of corrupted frames, cause I've even tried it with some downloaded videos.

Now that's a safe source of bad frames, that's for sure!

/Mats

[keckrodrigues]

There's one thing I usually do. Normally I use GoldWave to extract the audio of the files. When I use those Tmpeg Templates I select as audio source the wave file made by GoldWave, instead of the original file. Is there any problem about that? I heard somewhere that Tmpeg it's not very good with audio ...

I do believe that it's not a problem of corrupted frames, cause I've even tried it with some downloaded videos.

Now that's a safe source of bad frames, that's for sure!

I didn't get you! Were you been ironic?
I said that 'cause I've tried those download videos, and they all seen to work perfectly on the player! That's why I'm saying that I believe I'm during something wrong during the conversion.

[keckrodrigues]

I've made it guys... I've followed the instructions to set the DVDPlayer to "Multi-region" and all the sudden it begin to work... I'll do some more tests, but it seems to be solved ...

Thanks for your time and help!!!

-------> Edited <-------------

I was wrong!!! Oh God... I'm giving up. By this day and on I will only make SVCDs. They are bigger, and of slow conversion but they don't give me this crappy hard time. I'm really tired. If anyone has any tips please send me cause I'm about to give it up.

[reboot]

I have a feeling you're not getting the settings correct in TMPGEnc.
You need to find out what sort of avi you are dealing with.
If the avi is not 25fps, and you want to create a PAL compliant VCD, you need to change things. The same applies if it's 29.97fps or 23.976fps (or whatever).
TMPGEnc can do a good job, if the input and output settings are correct. Even if you're using a template, using a multi-pass VBR, or CQ-VBR, with the quality settings bumped up (sometimes a lot), can produce a very clean VCD.
I have tons of videos that are either too big to make an SVCD, or a waste of space to make a VCD (standard), so I bump up the quality to max in TMPGEnc, and make a VCD that will actually fill a CDR. Yes, the encoding takes longer, but the finished result is of much better quality.