Greetings!

I'm having some problems, and I hope someone can help.

1) My DVD player is a Memorex, and it plays VCDs.
2) I've played commercially-available VCDs on it.
3) I've played CD-R copies of commercially-available VCDs on it.

I ripped my DVD with cladMdec, converted it with DVD2AVI, then used TMPGEnc. Halfway through the TMPGEnc encoding process, my friend closed the program by mistake ("which one of those boxes minimizes the window, and which one closes it?&quot I took the 40 minutes of footage I had, and used Easy CD Creator 5 to make a VCD. It didn't work -- when the DVD player tries to read it, it says, "reading", then "PBC", then "VCD"...and then the machine just locks up. After this, none of the buttons work, and the only way to get the disc out is to turn the power off and on again.
I looked in the owner's manual to see what it said about "PBC", and it was something about chapters, so I went back to Easy CD Creator to try setting up a 1-level menu structure. I tried this disc in the DVD player, and it worked! Hooray -- I had the first 40 minutes of my movie on a working VCD.

I went back to TMPGEnc and encoded the whole darn movie. This, of course, was too long for 1 disc, so I used TMPGEnc's splitter abilities. I then burned the new files as VCDs, again using Easy CD Creator.

These new discs freeze up my DVD player. I can't figure out anything that's different between the old (working) disc and the new non-working discs. If I insert them in my computer, the Creative DVD player software recognizes and plays them perfectly. I've compared directory structures on the 2 discs, and I can't see any differences.

At this point, I'm starting to think that some aspect of the actual movie file (the frame rate, the audio bitrate, something) isn't quite right, though I thought that Easy CD Creator automatically detected and rejected any file that wasn't up to specs.

I'm using the same movie, the same software, the same brand of CD-R.

I've just tried ripping a trailer off another DVD (as a quick and dirty experiment), and it's locking the DVD player up, too.

The most frustrating part of this experience is having ONE VCD I've made work perfectly.

Any suggestions? Should I be using different burning software? Is there some setting I haven't set properly? I'm so frustrated!

Thanks.