Playback Problem - What did I do wrong?

[snuffi]

Have been trying for a long time now using the excellent information on this site but I'm still stuck and I'm not even sure where the problem lies.

I have a Daewoo 8000F DVD player (which I bought because it's said to be able to read pretty much everything) and use TMpegEnc, VCDEasy and FireBurner (earlier) / CDRDAO (now) to make VCDs / SVCDs but when I play them on my DVD they are of very poor quality (large blocks covering nearly half the picture even in scenes without much motion and starting at the very beginning of the VCD / SVCD)and intermittant audio gaps.

I've assumed it's the encoding and fiddled with the encoding for months (everything always played back fine on my computer, though).

I've also borrowed self-made VCDs from a friend and they playback in excellent quality in my DVD player. When I try to copy them using any kind of CD copy program the quality is unwatchable. When I extract the VCD using VCDImager or CDRDAO the quality is still very poor (see above). I switched to another computer with another CD writer, no improvement whatsoever.

I assumed it might be the media but I'm using the very same media as the original VCD from my friend.

When using FireBurner nothing I burnt ever worked. Using CDRDAO I can burn to CD-RW which plays in excellent quality on my DVD player. Repeating the same procedure (same file, same settings, etc.) with a CD-R resulted in the same bad quality as always. (Was using Platinum CD-Rs and Platinum CD-RWs)

Now I'm quite at a loss as to where the problem might lie. Anyone got any ideas?

[snuffi]

What i forgot to mention is that there is no difference in which format I use. Both VCD and SVCD are recognized by my DVD player and it plays them, though in horrible quality.

I used a program to analyze the CD-R media and the CD-Rs I used are exactly the same brand and dye type as the ones I got from a friend of mine. His work perfectly, mine don't. So that would suggest it's not the media. I recorded with both an HP8200 and a brand-new Lite On (forgot the model number), always with the same results. Minimum recording speed seems to be 4x (cdrdao overrules my manually lowering speed).

So if anyone got an idea, please help me out, I'm really stuck...

[Oracle]

What speed are you writing your CDR`s ,check again, the lower the better.
I am also using Platinum CDR`s and generally write at 2x or 4x and have no problems.

Tried burning at 8x & 16x a couple of times and got a lot of skipping during playback.

[snuffi]

The lowest speed I can burn at is 4x. Even if I manually enter all the command-line commands for CDRDAO and set it to 1x, it still burns at 4x. Seems to be the lowest settings for the recorder...

Is there a way to force the speed down ?

[snuffi]

Is there really nobody who has an idea? Just a pointer to get me started, once I know where the problem lies I'll find out the rest myself...

Sorry that I have to trouble you all...