Questions for the VCD Masters!

[Lomar]

First off, this web site and forum is fantastic.

Secondly, I'm new to this whole "sub-culture" and am working to come up to speed.

I have a Samsung 612 DVD/VCD Player, a decked out PC and I'm using a late model Plextor burner.

I'm attempting to create some (S)VCD disks from straight .MOV, .MPG and .AVI files. I've gone through the forums and already taken my lumps on the whole conversion process (using MOV2AVI.EXE and TMPEngc).

My issues/questions are:

I make a NTSC VCD with Nero and pop it in my Samsung DVD player. It takes...oh...5-7x longer than a normal DVD disc to load. Originally it wouldn't load at all until I started using RW discs. Even now, sometimes the disc will just "stop working".

Should I use different burning software? Some people seem to love Nero, some hate it. What is going to be the most consistent for me?

Different RW discs? Are they all created equal?

Different format on burn (maybe PAL or something)? I think my 2 options are NTSC and PAL. What is going to be more reliable?

Different conversion methods? When converting it to MPEG (TMPEngc) I use the "standard templates" provided.

Any help/insight on the above would be appreciated!

[Anonymous65]

Not all DVD players will play CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Try different brands and find the one that works the best.

Nero should not be a problem (unless you're using menus and stuff).

PAL/NTSC will not change the readability of the CD. PAL is used in Europe, and NTSC is used in the US.

The standard template in Tmepg works fine in most cases.

[vitualis]

As what skittelsen said.

Lomar, one other thing I can think of (that should be quick to test) is to try burning at a lower burn speed. For some people, this helps when their DVD drive has difficulty reading the media, but it is by no means certain.

Otherwise, try out the tips skittelsen have in the above post.

Good luck.

Regards.