I have a Pioneer 525 and it plays DVD's well. But when trying to play VCD's, it plays rather slowly. i.e I can see that there is a skipping of frames which makes it difficult to watch. Is this a normal playback problem ?

-- Raj (raaj127@yahoo.com), April 12, 2000

Answers

Raj,

The Pioneer 525 is a good machine. What you are describing is not normal for compliant VCD. It takes a lot for this machine to act like that. One of the thing that will cause it to behave in that manner is the VCD videobitrate is too high. Check your VCD on your computer player to see if this issue also occur there. Furthermore, check the *.dat inside the MpegAV folder with Window MediaPlayer under the propertie and mpeg video decoder to see what bitrate it has.

-- (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), April 12, 2000.

The pioneer 525 is the best machine for playing home made VCD's. You must not be encoding the mpeg at the right bitrate. Adaptec and WinonCD will only allow burning of Video CD's that are done at the correct bitrate but Nero will allow any bitrate. The correct bitrate is 1150 for video and 224 for audio. The frame rate is 29.97NTSC and 25 for PAL. These bitrates will produce a full whitebook spec video CD which will play on a pioneer 525. The pioneer 302 also plays them well.

-- Doug Harding (dharding@mdcc.edu), April 13, 2000.

the pioneer 525 can handle a bitrate up to 2500 no higher

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), April 13, 2000.