Hello my name is Daniel and I have a problem... I have a panasonic DVD player that has CDR,VCD,SVCD,DVD etc etc etc and is multi-regional... I also have a few VCD's that I love to watch. Now--- Some of my VCD's work, and other don't work. The one's that work, work great with no problems at all. The one's that don't, tend to 'Flicker' on my screen. They flash in & out of the movie and sub screen ever 2 seconds. Sound is fine! - anyone know whats going on? All recorded on same cdr's. Now, they do work on other DVD players, which leads me to the conclusion that it's my DVD player or my TV. I have a dramatic theatre TV and a Panasonic DVD... Anything I can do??? Have read all manuals and tried to change NTSC & PAL on both TV and DVD player, but no go!!! Please help... thankyou

-- Daniel Santos (mulloofnuts@hotmail.com), January 10, 2002

Answers

Go to www.tecoltd.com and get the free Bit Rate Viewer. Take a VCD that plays correctly on your Panasonic and open the *.dat file in the MPEGAV subdirectory of the VCD. See if it's PAL or NTSC video. It will take a few minutes to read the entire file. Then take a VCD that gives you problems and look at it. I bet that you will find that everything that plays correctly is the same format - PAL or NTSC - and everything that won't play correctly is in the other format. Your problem is often caused by a PAL/NTSC TV output mismatch. If you are lucky, your DVD player will have an option to give TV output as PAL, NTSC, or any. "any" may be something like AUTO or MULTI. Set your TV output to be whatever is correct for your TV player. Many people mistakenly pick AUTO which only works if you have a multistandard DVD player. You want your DVD player to convert all output to whatever your TV will play, so you need to set it to either PAL or NTSC as appropriate. I have heard of DVD players that can not convert between PAL and NTSC, although a multi-region player should be able to. If your DVD player can not convert between PAL and NTSC, there is nothing you can do.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), January 10, 2002.