Toshiba SD210 & VCD Playback Problems

[a.wright]

Hi,

I have been editing and producing holiday videos for about 4 yrs now and decided it would be a good idea to convert to VCD so that I could watch them via my DVD player. I have been trawling this site for days reading all the tutorials, forums etc....but have not found an answer to my problem.

I use my Panasonic MPEG1 encoder which produces excellent results when converting from MJPEG avi files at 704*576 resolution. I used the correct conversion option to be compliant with the VCD2.0 standard.

I have tried using EASY CD 5.0 & ULEAD Moviefactory burning to Kodak Ultima CD-R media on my HP 9300.

Result: DVD plays the VCD but every few seconds skips frames, goes blocky or shows lots of green on the screen!

I thought that VCD was a standard with a set bitrate and that if a DVD player was compatible it would work. My PC DVD ROM works fine with the VCD I burnt but the standalone appears to have problems coping with the bitrate and I assume this is why it won't play properly.

This is a bit of a blow. The DVD player is only 6 months old and is supposed to be compatable with VCD & SVCD.

Anyone else had problems with this DVD player or have I done something wrong in the conversion/burning process?

Many thanks

Andrew

[thxkid]

Ummm, I never heard a Toshiba able to play SVCD, VCD yes and most only if you use certain die CD-R's. It took me 3 weeks of trying almost every machine out there to find one other than Apex to play SVCD, best result was a Daewoo 5700 for $99 at Sams club and it has the newer audio and video DA chips found in the best Toshiba, JVC and Panasonic DVD players.
Well your bitrate for SVCD should be any where from 2000 to 2520 anything else and you may run into problems another reason I bought the daewoo bitrates from 1700 to 6000 work perfect in it.
Also I have never had any good luck using Roxio (aka easy creator) to burn VCD's or SVCD's I use NERO which works fantastic.
I have burning VCD's for 3 years and SVCD's over a year and having no problems with either on any DVD player I have tried it on that supports VCD or SVCD, this includes toshiba, Apex, Daewoo, Pioneer, Samsung, Panasonic, Lasonic, Sanyo.

[a.wright]

Ummm, I never heard a Toshiba able to play SVCD, VCD yes and most only if you use certain die CD-R's.

Are DVD players very critical about certain CDR media then? It does not have any problem playing any audio CD's that I have burned onto any type of CDR. I understood the Kodak Ultima CDR to be very good for this sort of project. What media do you use?

Seems to me that the claims made by software producers that VCD can be played on almost all stand alone DVD players is perhaps a little optimistic!

Thanks

Andrew

[a.wright]

I have done some more testing and am now even more confused!

I thought I would try a SVCD using Ulead DVD Moviefactory just to see how it compared to the playing problems I am having with VCD. To my suprise, even though the bitrate is almost double, the video played through almost perfectly with just one stutter. The video quality was awful though as Moviefactory seems to create files with Field Order A and my source avi file is field order B but that can probably be sorted.

So, why can I play SVCD and not VCD on my DVD player? Is it the software not writing 100% compliant CDs? I really want to use VCD as I can put alot of "ok" quality video on 1 CD.

Any comments would be most useful and gratefully received.

Andrew