Picture freezes when playing VCDs on Philips DVD 622

[foxxy]

Hi,

My Philips DVD 622 player plays most VCDs fine, with very good picture quality. But sometimes, the picture freezes and when I try and fast forward, the film stops and I have to start from the beginning. If I try and fast forward during a film, the same thing happens. (This problem doesn't happen when playing DVDs)

I burn at 2x to 4x speed using Nero and use decent media.

Any ideas why this is happenning?

[MikeGiff]

Hi,

I have the same problem with my 622 and xSVCD's. So, dont worry it's not a problem with your player. I have heard people saying something about upgrading the firmware....aint sure though.....try searching.

Cheers,
Mike

[RoopeT]

"So, dont worry it's not a problem with your player"

It's indeed a problem with the player. My Philips 622 freezes with all VCDs / SVCDs (tried tens of them, although most of my encodings are non-standard). But even a fully standard vcd burned with WinOnCD 3.8 on a CDRW at 1x freezes once in a while.

It's really hard to track down what's going wrong, since a VCD might work OK for the first 20 minutes or so. After some testing* i'm getting to the conlusion that there must be something wrong with the laser reading CDs (i'm also having no problems playing DVDs). I will try to get it repaired next week, hope that's not too hard to convince the dealer that there really is something wrong with the player.

*testing = different encoding settings, different encoders (TMPGEnc 0.12 a,e,f,g,h,i,j, 2.0, 2.01, CCE 2.5, 2.62, LSX ...), different burning progs (Nero 5.5.x, VCDimager Easy 1.0.0, WinOnCD 3.8, Iauthor + EasyCDCreator ...)

[lusid]

I've had similar problems with my Phillips DVD825 from the beginning. Their players are very picky about the mpegs and the media they are on.

I found that if the mpeg has sequence headers then it will freeze for a moment and then jump to the next GOP, but if it does not then the player either jumps to the next track or restarts from the beginning. It does the same thing when you try to FF or RW on a vcd without sequence headers in the mpeg stream. Sometimes it will even crash hard and I'll have to power cycle it. But it only does this if there is an error in the mpeg stream, or I used a low quality CD.

I've found that using tmpgenc and burning with quality media has eliminated the problem for me.

If it's a media problem then burning to a name brand media will either not freeze, or not freeze in the same spot. If it freezes in the same spot on different brands of media then your source file is the problem.

There is not much else you can do aside from go shopping for a new player.

[RoopeT]

So what's your recommendation for the media then?
Burning the same svcd track on Traxdata CDRW and TDK CDR resulted in different freezing spots, so the problem is somewhat media related.

"There is not much else you can do aside from go shopping for a new player" - I just bought the damn player, and haven't watched a single movie from start to end, just testing for two months

[lusid]

I've had very good luck with Imation and TDK. I actually prefer TDK.

Memorex was nothing but trouble, same for the no-name generics.

[RoopeT]

Already tried both Imation and TDK, no luck

[lusid]

Have you tried running a laser cleaning cd through it?

My player started getting stupid at one point, sometimes refusing to even recognise a DVD. I used one of those cleaning cds and it fixed it.

[RoopeT]

Haven't tried laser cleaning CD (Haven't got one). Anyway, I called Philips customer service here in Finland, and they agreed there could be something wrong with my player and gave an adress where to bring my player for checking / repairing