What is best burning speed for VCD.

[rallytbk]

I was wondering with all the information on creating VCD's. Virtually nothing is said about the speed in which someone must burn a VCD. Is it 1x, 2x, or more. I would like to create VCD's for fun and profit, but everytime I create a VCD for a friend I find myself giving excuses instead of looking good.

While they play great on computers, I hate it when they play randomly on DVD/VCD players. What is the common burn speed for VCD players?
Can you guys help me.

Thank you in advance.

[resnullius]

unfortunatly unless you can press cd's you'll have to keep giving excuses cause the speed your writing at has little impact on whether or not it'll play on a set top dvd player. the brand of cd's might help (I've had very good results from gigastorage), cdrws work on more set tops...
You might however keep a list of what works on who's dvd player (keep a list of your friends players) and burn accordingly. If you happen to know what the end player will be you can use the dvd player compatibility list from the site.

[James_T_Kirk]

Im not a salesman just a person had problems with VCD's, Untill i took advice from VCDhelp message boards and bought an Apex digital DVD player. I got a three disc APEX 5131 from circuit city for $139 and a nine dollar warranty. tell your friends to by one because it will play everyhing o3ut there except for MiniDVD. I have player SVCD's with a bit rate of 4500kbps Which is above DVD quality flawlessly on it. It also will play raw MPEG files and MP3's burned on a cd. If you stick a burnt cd in it and it's not a VCD or SVCD, it doesn't reject it, it will show you the root and allow you to search through the file system for mpg files. It's awsome and it's cheap and im really happy with it.

One problem - this is why i got a warranty - it seems APEX has a rep for their machines going tits up on your so get the warranty so you can just get it replaced. I've had mine for a month now, and it has been working just fine.

[rallytbk]

Thank you for the infomation.

I was aware of the pressed CD's factor, but considering that new DVD/VCD players are providing better features such as CDR,CDRW and MP3 service the drive speed for some or all of these players are not being provided.

What I would like to hear is a blanket statement like VCD standard 2.0 = 2x, 4x and 6x speed, but nothing is stated and I have to guess speed at my expense.

Anyway thanks again for the info (unless their is more info, please reply).

[kinneera]

What I would like to hear is a blanket statement like VCD standard 2.0 = 2x, 4x and 6x speed, but nothing is stated and I have to guess speed at my expense.

The reason you won't get any such statement is because there is no "best" burning speed. In most cases its totally irrelevant, and a majority of us burn at the highest speed available to us. The only time it may be relevant is when you are using low-quality media or trying to get a picky standalone (one that's not even guaranteed to read CD-Rs anyway) to read the disc.

[sommersby]

I have found that 8x is a good speed for me, I can use the cheapest media and I have 4 different brands of stand alone players plus friends that borrow my movies and that speed seems to create vcd's that play in anything, when I have tried 12x or faster they usually play in my pioneer but not in all 4 players. This is what works for me and I have done over 300 movies, hope this helps.

[videoguy79]

I have found that so long as I use good media that is rated for at least the maximum speed of my CD-RW drive, I have never had any "burning" related problems with VCDs/SVCDs. When I do have problems with my discs, its my own damn fault, not the speed at which I burned my VCD.

[Triffid]

I burn at the fastest rate I can (10x RW and 24x R) and have NO problems....and why should I, I don't see how the rate you burn at can effect the data that is burned (assuming the burner and disc can handle it).

It would be interesting though to here from some of those people who have claimed that you should burn at low speed...to try and understand what is going on there.

The only problem I have run into recently in burning (S)VCDs is that my CD burner didn't like my system being overclocked.....wasted a few discs before I sorted that one out!

[PigOnWing]

Bearing in mind that it was written some time ago, check out The CD-R FAQ, especially Section 3-31. You might also want to ahve a glance at the article "The Speed of Sound: How Safe is High-Speed CD-Audio Recording?".

Basically, if my faint memory serves me right, the idea is that besides the 'bits are bits' section of the data on a CD, there's the 'error correction' part - the exact 304 byte change betweeen the 2048 'Data' block and the 2352 'raw' blocks on CD - and on higher speed burns, the 'error correction' part might be calculated differently/insufficiently/wrong.

As the MPG section on a VCD is written using the RAW mode (which is why we refer to a 700 MPG file as 'fit for 74 mins CD) and an 800 MB file as 'fit for 80 mins CD), it may, regarding this issue, have the same characterizing problems as Audio CDs.

But again, bear in mind that all this was written a few CPU generations ago. Due to improvement in speed and stability of the whole system (and not just the burner), this information may be redundant - and thus, it shouldn't matter what speed you burn at.

Personal experience: I burned an Audio CD at x24, at x10 and at x4. All played well. Extracting the audio back from the CD and making a bitwise comparison, the x24 & x10 version matched between themselves, but not the the x4 and original wav version (which, again, matched between themselves). So exact it was not, but the importancy of the differencies are questionable.

(All this, for the conclusion of 'it varies'?)

-- Piggie

[MarvinMar]

I have founf that 8x allways works fine for me.
I burned about 15 disks at 24x one day then went I checked them they were broken.
There would be Blocks all over the screen, The screen would hang, The audio would go all "Poppy" and "Scratchy"

I have not tried 12x or 16x yet.

This problem occurs on my P3 866 computer as well as on all DVD players I have tested.

[sumibas02]

hi,

i have burnt VCDs in 2X,4X,8X,12X and 16X. all worked exactly the same except for 16x. always had some blocy things at 16X. But 12X worked fine as i burnt it in 2X. By DVD palyer is SONY NS400D

Baskaran
Baskaran@yahoo.com

[DMaarten]

In my case the speed DOES matter. I've burned a svcd at 12 speed, and sometimes it played jerky when scrolling from left to right or up do down or so, but when I burn it at 2 speed it is gone, and plays reall good

[sub]I love dbz svcd's from dvd rips :P[/sub]

[sdispun]

If speedometer in your car said 120 MpH, it doesn't mean you can hit the floor and it'll go that fast. Same principal apply to most cd-rw (I said most because some can perform it's job at max speed).

We have more than 10 burners here at the shop, HP 4x can do 4x, Creative 4x can only do 2, otherwise the video will come out block noice, and cracking sound. Best sample is my 24x10x40, for files and folders 24x comes out fine, but when it comes to VCD, 16x is a sure thing, 20x some do some don't, 24x is out of the question.

It may have had something to do with "power celebration" when exceed it's limitation. All in all, instead of 3 minutes now 4 mins, lower the speed down a few notch doens't hurt anything right?

[Anonymous65]

I have a 16x burner, but make my VCD's at 8 or 12x, I stay away from top speed. Some DVD players will have problems reading disks made at top speed, most likely because of the performance of the CD burner. I have also noticed when burning 99 min CD-R's, I have to use 4x (or lower)for the DVD player to play it back correctly. Remember, that the DVD player plays the VCD disk at 1x speed, not like a CD-ROM that might play the disk at 40x. When burning at a lower speed, the focus and tracking of the burning laser is more correct and deviate less than at high speed.

[jeex]

if you use decent cd-r media, with a decent burner, and a decent dvd player you should have no problems.. but should one of those things be crappy, then you will encounter problems.. the main thing you should stray from is shitty cd-r media.. burning speed is really irrelevant.. what does matter is the quality of the media and the device that is reading it..