I'll try to condense this down as small as I can (some familiars to this site should be aware of my tale). Basically my Apex 500W has started having "blips" occur in the read process, where it will spring up with tons of macroblocks, then re-synch and continue playing perfectly. Always on the same spot in the movie (on clean, new CD-R's). And, on two separate players (I took the first back, traded in for a second which reproduced this problem)

I blamed the Apex 500W drive, since it looked like it had a probelm reading these CD-R. So, I went ahead tonight and replaced it, with my Pioneer DVD-113 PC-DVD Rom. I figured that since VCD's played nicely on my PC (as in no sputters or read problems), putting the same drive on the Apex might help. Well, I got shocked at 2 things. ONE: The Pioneer drive worked on the Apex! TWO: It didn't work any better than the Apex. In fact, it might have even been worse. Blips are there still. I eventually want to try a Toshiba drive in it, but I have to reason to think it's better than the Pioneer.

Ruling out the player, I thought maybe I should get me a new burner. But this doesn't make sense... why would the disc work on my PC on the Pioneer, but not on the Apex? Anyway, should this be my problem, are the Plextor "Burnproof"-s any good?

I also thought maybe it's the re-multiplexing
with bbMPEG. I only started noticing this particular problem when I remuxed to bring movies into synch, to keep motion drift in line too (which worked for that, but these blips showed up at the same time)... does a remux with TMPGEnc do anything better or worse than bbMPEG? Will it solve both problems? Or is there a better program?

I'm completely at my wits end here. Anyone else see these sort of blips before, and solve it? Thanks!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: homerpez on 2001-08-22 20:56:11 ]</font>