Apex 500w Update (Mainly Helpful hints)

[SiNXation]

I get tons of emails a day on this DVD player like I'm some kind of expert on it or something. But I understand some people may be having problems with this player for some reason or another and I'm here to help.

1. This player has played many vcd video formats that I have tested. Resolution size has been changed so many times just to see if the player wouldplay it and it did. So to all those people like like to manipulate the video files, have fun. This player should play it as long as its burned as a vcd, it doesn't have to be a standard vcd.

2.Menu.... Well apparently the player has problems with vcd menus some times. This one I have not figured out yet. I tried using the nero menu and got my movie playing in a lil frame about 5% of the screen height. Will do more testing on this and tell my results.

3. Out of sync, bloccs, Jumpy ......... etc. Well this one took some time to figure out. These problems are all fault of the burns. I know what you about to say and yes its still the fault of the burns or more specifically the burners. The laser in the Apex 500w isn't as powerful as other dvd players. So the movies have to be burned very well. I had a Panasonic 7503 burner. And all movies burned with that burner most were glitchy. So I tried burning the movies at 4x instead of 8x. This helped out alot but still some glitchyness. Then I tried putting labels on the vcds. This helped even more will lil glitches everyone now and then. Then I got a new burner a Plextor (yes the best) and burned movies on the exact same brand of cd-rs out of the same pakkage. I burned them at 16x and not one single glitch. These are using the cheap blanks from compusa. So the better the burn and/or burner the least amount of glitches. CD Brand may also have a factor but has not made any difference to me.

4. Sefy template works ... it works.


More to come soon.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions of stuff to try I'm open to suggestions.

[powderpuffhunk]

Have you had this problem...

I'm very pleased with the Apex 500w, but I have had some problems, particularly when using higher quality VCDs/SVCDs. The most recent problem is an A/V sync problem on the second half of a movie from alt.binaries.VCD. Disc one worked and looked GREAT! Disc two however, gets a sync problem about 5 minutes in and never recovers. Somehow the video gets ahead of the audio. I started trying to break down the problem, to find the point of failure, here's where I am, I'd appreciate your thoughts:

Post was in bin/cue, but I extracted the SVCD mpeg from the bin. WinDVD 2000 played the file just fine, NO sync problem. So, I burned to SVCD format using Nero at 8x speed. Played the disc again with WinDVD 2000 without a problem. Popped it into the Apex 500w and encountered the sync problem. I would blame the burn but it works fine with WinDVD. I would suspect the CD-R but part one of the movie works fine in the Apex. Thought about re-burning at a slower speed but don't know if this is the problem. I'm kind of at a loss here. Everything points to the Apex as the problem EXCEPT for the fact that part one works fine.

Any thoughts???

[SiNXation]

Well if you remeber in my previous post I did say sometimes could be the burner and how deep it burns. Don't worry about how WinDVD playes them. PC reads cd just great cuz of the powerful laser they have. You may want to try putting a label on it but I found that usually only helped skippyness & not out of sync problems most of the time. Since the first cd works pefectly and the 2nd doesn't is quiet strange. I only play the movies in WinDVD just to see if there was a problem with the file. PC not good for dected movie problems with the cd itself.

What Burner you have?
Media Type?
Both cd's burned to same brand of media?

Take in consideration that cd-2 may just be defected or dirsty ... etc, you know ... blah blah blah.

----
ALSO - I tried this earlier for some reason that escapes me. Put the 2nd cd file into your pc and see if you can drag the DAT file and copy it to your hard drive. If it does just delete it after the copy, if it doesn't there might be an cd problem. Just something to try.

[powderpuffhunk]

<sigh>
Tried a re-burn of CD2 last night at 4X instead of 8X...same result. My guess is that it's a combination of my Apex DVD player and the file encoding itself. I can't fault the poster, it may work fine for him, of course he may just be testing on his PC and/or some other brand of DVD player. Back to the old saying: Your mileage may vary. Still strikes me as odd that part 1 worked okay. I was wrong on one point in my previous post, the audio and video were out of sync from the start, didn't realize it at first because there was little dialog in the first few minutes of the SVCD. Last question, is it possible to remanipulate this existing file to correct the synchronization problem. I've read here on VCDHelp that with TMPGenc and virtualdub you can separate the A/V and re-encode using the two sources. Had any success with this?

As for my burner, it's a Philips, and I used Memorex 700MB for both SVCD's.

Thanks for your input!

[SiNXation]

Yes you can remanipulate the file using borth TMPEnce & VirtualDub. I don't see the point in doing this but if you have an idea about getting it to work let me know.

Did you try my idea about copying the DAT file to the hd?
What movie is this? (Maybe I got it too & can compare)