Hi folks,

I've been trying to encode VCD's for a while now, I've had lots of practice and learned a fair bit about the software I finally settled on [so many different programs and advice, eh?]

Software used is:
  • DVD Decrypter
    DVD2AVI
    TMPGEnc
    VCDEasy

The VCD's I encode work on my player, so do chapters, menus and stills, but I am having playback issues. I have been trying to determine whether it is an encoding [TMPGEnc], authoring [VCDEasy] or mastering [VCDEasy inbuilt CDRDAO] issue that is causing the playback probs. I get a fair amount of blox, jerking, tearing and sometimes synch probs, these are all aggrevated by adding chapters or adding more than just the MPEG1 to the VCD layout. It may yet prove to be my player that sux

There are still clashing opinions on settings\approaches as well as some unexplained areas of knowledge, but most importantly I am concerned about compliance warnings I get from VCDEasy when it is analysing\compiling MPEGs for a VCD2.0; I always get the following warnings in the log:

Code:
[VCDxMInfo.exe]
trying to open mpeg stream...
strange (possibly non-compliant) user_data seen...
APS' pts seems out of order (actual pts 720.706700, last seen pts 720.786700) -- ignoring this aps
APS' pts seems out of order (actual pts 911.106700, last seen pts 911.186700) -- ignoring this apspts start offset 0.346711 (max pts = 3468.866700)
playing time 3468.519989
stream scan completed
So I am guessing that the APS errors my MPEG1s have are maybe the culprit? I have seen it stated in the log sometimes that the "strange (possibly non-compliant) user_data seen..." is "not a problem, usually a sign of TMPGEnc..."

Would these errors be causing\worsening playback issues? I generally let it mux vid\audio on the fly while encoding from D2V and WAV [from DVD2AVI]

I am down to trial-&-error, no problem sgetting the errors but all the trialling is chewing up discs and teaching me little.

Not sure what to do, but the discs play up in my DVD & CDR-RW drives as well so I think it may be more than just my standalone player and thus worth learning about.

VCDs I encode are: MPEG1 [PAL] 352x288 25fps CBR 1150 kbit\sec, Layer2 44100Hz stereo @ 224 kbits\sec

Any help greatly appreciated