Disclaimer: This post is intended for SONY DVP-S360 owners trying to make VCD's ONLY. As it is the DVD player that I own.

I'm kind of sick of seeing people post that either don't know how to burn VCD's or bought the wrong CDR media, saying that "CDR's won't work", in a Sony DVP-S360. CDR WILL WORK in the DVP-S360. This post isn't a be all end all for all DVP-S360 CDR media questions either. My goal is to tell all you DVP-S360 owners what has worked for me.

I am currently using TMPGEnc (beta 12h) to convert a bunch of ASF files to MPG for use by NERO (5.0.3. to create VCD's (as you know, our DVD player won't play SVCD's). I burn the CD's using a Teac 8X24 SCSI CD writer. And it works great.

One catch, is that for the particular ASF's that I am using, I use PAL instead of NTSC in TMPGEnc to get the correct resolution for VCD's in my Sony S360 (the S360 will play both NTSC and PAL formatted VCD's and the use of PAL by me is probably specific to my situation only). This may not be true for all types of input into TMPGEnc for MPG creation with the intent to create VCD's. You may have to burn a few test CD's before you get your resolution right, just experiment with it depend on what your input files are.

Another catch, for the particular ASF's that I'm converting. TMPGEnc doesn't decode the audio correctly (the sound is very choppy if I allow TMPGEnc to extract the audio). I first have to use VirtualDUB to extract the audio out of the ASF and save it as a WAV file (there is a guide to this at http://www.vcdhelp.com/virtualdubaudio.htm) . I then select the video source as the ASF file in TMPGEnc and select the extracted WAV file as the audio source. At the VERY VERY VERY end of the encoding process from ASF to MPG in TMPGEnc I get an error message complaning about the audio, but it is so close to the end of the ASF (99.9 percent done) that I don't worry about it..

The CDR media that I use (and this is no BS) is:

1. Prime Peripherals 80Min/700MB (bought at Office Max for 15.00 - spool of 50)
2. Princo

I have read reports that the following CDR brands work as well.. I have not tried these

1. CompUSA CD-R bulk spindle (this is a Princo brand)
2. Gigastorage CD-R 80min/700MB

I hope this helps you S360 owners. If you have any questions feel free to follow up post. If you're one of those "CDR's won't work" people the try the two CDR brands that I use and try changing to the software configuration that I use. Also, try flashing to the latest firmware on your CD ROM Writer as well. The guides on this site to NERO and TMPGEnc are all that you need to get started and will produce working VCD's. You may have to tweek a little on your own later.

Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion,,

L8r
-Jeff