I've burned some VCDs and have been playing them in my stand-alone DVD player (JVC XV-523). The problem is that the audio is kind of choppy. However, the audio syncs fine and there's no problem with the video. When playing the VCDs on my PC, the audio is entirely fine. Why would I only have a problem with the audio in the DVD player and not the PC?

The audio on the burned VCDs was 224kps at 44.1 khz. The input source was originally from a DVD at 192kps at 48 khz. I used Flask 0.594 to do the conversion. While Flask says I was decoding the AC3 stream to MPEG-1 II, is it possible that the audio stream wasn't getting converted properly?

Any thoughts?

-- Jon (latenite80@hotmail.com), January 30, 2001

Answers

What did you use to burn VCD? Nero 5 will interrogate your files and complain if it isnt upto VCD Specs...

Also, there are utilities to check mpegs (mp2 and mpg) and fix errors. Namely, VCDgear (www.vcdgear.com).

Maybe you created VBR mpeg1 layer II sounds.... I use mp3_check to get evidence of mpeg type (sourceforge.net/projects/mp3check)

good luck JurgyMan

-- Al (JurgyMan@yahoo.com), January 30, 2001.

Thanks for the input, Al. I was using NERO, which was telling me the audio was ok.

I discovered what the problem was, which may have been more apparent had I mentioned I was burning XVCDs. It seems that at some video bitrate between 2500 and 3000, the DVD begins to have problems decoding the audio and renders it choppy. At higher bitrates between 3000 and 3500 the video also starts to become choppy.

So a video bitrate of 2500 and and audio bitrate of 224 works great.

Now that I've nearly worked out the optimum bitrate, any suggestions as to what framesize I should use? I'm currently using 352x288 NTSC. I know I can go all the way up to 720x480, but at a video bitrate of around 2500, how large might be best? And any guidelines as video with high vs. low motion?

Thanks

-- Jon (latenite80@hotmail.com), February 01, 2001.