Will the old Philips/Magnavox CDI450/550 play newer White Book VCDs? I picked one up at a garage sale and it came with the Philips copy of "Dances With Volves", which has both Cdi and Video CD directories. It has the cartridge too. TIA,

w sanders at netcom dot com (remove the X's around the @ sorry maybe it will prevent spammers.)

-- W Sanders (wsandersX@Xnetcom.com), May 18, 2000

Answers

Yes. The CDi 450 with the mpeg cartridge can play VideoCD 1.1 (cdi) and 2.0 (Whitebook). If you're going to create your vcd with the Panasonic encoder, *be sure* to demux the Mpeg file created by Panasonic and remuxit with Xing Encoder - otherwise the playback will be *very* jerky.

-- Jean-Luc Picard (jl.picard@startrekmail.com), May 19, 2000.

To further answer my own question, the Video-CDs I received happened to be Malaysian and designed for playback on PAL TVs. (Are any NTSC-formatted discs of recent movies even available?) Because the discs are formatted for a PAL market, they are slightly stretched in the vertical. This is only slightly annoying for an unsubtitled movie (would be *very* annoying for a true videophile; but if you are a videophile you're not going to be watching a VideoCD for its image quality) but it could present a major problem in a subtitled movie or karaoke disc. Be careful! The authoring system is not fully compatible with the CDI-550 either, you cannot Rev or FF, but this just forces you to watch the entire disc without stopping.

-- W Sanders (wsanders@netcom.com), May 24, 2000.

OOPS - I posted back too hastily. "Three Kings" would NOT play back correctly; it freezes about 15 min into the movie. "The Matrix" and the first reel of "Zero Effect" played back OK though. More info as I work through these titles.

-- W Sanders (wsanders@netcom.com), May 25, 2000.

Detailed answer: Spartacus, Ben-Hur, Zero Effect, The Matrix, Episode 1 all played back. Three Kings would not play all the way through. A small speck of crud on the Episode 1 CD prevented it from playing completely but it played OK after cleaning. Incomplete menu control on all discs. There seem to be 2 different mastering programs - the "CE Quadrat" one for BH, ZE, TM, and 3K prevents any kind of control except straight through play of disc, the other (unidentified) program allows scene-by scene selection but no Rev, FF, etc. All images slightly stretched in vertical; these are Malaysian discs played back on NTSC.

-- W Sanders (wsanders@netcom.com), May 30, 2000.