I need to post this because of all the pain I went through figuring out how to do it. Firstly, I just got too good a deal on the player to pass it up. I know, Apex will play anything, but just not this well. The sound from this is incredible. I use it for music cd's and it puts my sony cd player to shame. The video output is equally good. But I digress. This player will not play cd-r's, only cd-rw's and not all of them. I have a Memorex 1622, yeah it's old, but it never fails. I also have and HP 8200e. Between the two of them I made 20 coasters and 3 VCD's. I've tried Memorex, HP, Fuji, Imation and CompUsa brand. The one HP I had and the one Fuji both worked on the HP burner, one Imation worked on the Memorex once. But that was it. Until I upgraded the firmware on the Memorex. According to the update, it would allow some toshiba drives to read cd's burnt by the memorex when they couldn't before. Whether JVC is using Toshiba drives or something else I don't know, all I know is now it works flawlessly. Only on Imation CD-RW's. Still makes coasters with Memorex and CompUsa brands. Granted these coasters may work perfectly in other players.

The moral of this story: If you want to make VCD's for this player use Imation CD-RW's.

Hopefully reading all of this didn't cause you as much pain as what I went through getting it to work.