VCD Video Glitches

[Morloc]

I'm looking for opinions on the source of VCD playback problems. I made a backup of the High Crimes DVD using CladDVDXP, TMPEGEnc, and VCDEasy (at 4x speed) to burn the CDs. I split the movie over 2 disks. The DVD is NTSC Film, and I made the appropriate settings in Clad and TMPEG. Playback on the PC in Win Media Player looks fine. Playback of each disk in my Toshiba SD-3750 looked fine too until near the end of each file (~50 minutes in) when I started to get some blocky artifacts, video pauses, audio pops, etc. I then mounted the bin/cue files to a virtual Daemon Tools drive and used Nero do do a CD copy at 8x(slowest speed option). The results were much, much better but still had an occasional glitch near the end of each side.

I have read in these forums that some people have had playback issues with the Toshiba. Others have had no problems. Some people don't like the Memorex 24x CD-Rs I use. Others think they are fine.

So my question is does anyone have an idea of whether the problem is with VCDEasy vs. Nero, poor quality CD-Rs, my player, or something else? Or perhaps a couple of glitches at the end of each disk are the best I'm going to get - so don't worry - be happy - crack open a cold one?

Thanks in advance,
Morloc

[scottrempel]

Hi, I also made VCD's of High Crimes using CladDVD XP/TMPEG/Nero and they look fine on my Toshiba SD-2800. I use super cheap no name cd's.
I stay away from Maxwell cd's because of issues I have had with them in the past. I always use nero to burn and it has never failed me (have wrote up to 16X).
Is it possibe that your computer might need a defrag? Sometimes if you are running other apps during encoding it will mess stuff up.

[Morloc]

Thanks, Scott. Since I started making VCDs, I'm into the habit of defragging regularly, and shutting down most apps before encoding or burning. I also took some steps just yesterday to clean up my registry and hard drives. There are lots of good freeware programs to do this. I hope these precautions will help prevent performance issues from being the cause for my VCD problems. Thanks for your suggestions.

Morloc