I recently burned a vcd that plays fine in my parents DVD player but when I play it in mine it will only play the first few seconds of each track. I have burned vcds before that have worked fine in my DVD player. whats going on?

-- Corey Maaskant (chssdms@hotmail.com), February 14, 2002

Answers

It could be the CD-R/RW you usad! I just got a Sony DVD player that has no problem playing VCD's, "IF THEY ARE ON SONY CD-RW's"!:-(

-- Phil (defiance23@hotmail.com), February 14, 2002.

Phil - I hope you see this reply as it might interest you also.

Corey - you have 2 potential issues here. 1) Not all players support CD-R or CD-RW media. It could be that your DVD player doesn't. Go to www.vcdhelp.com and look at the DVD player compatibility list to see if your player supports CD-R or CD-RW. 2) CD-R and CD-RW are not alike. They use different dyes and some work better than others. It's possible that your DVD player doesn't like your media. My best advice is to avoid the cheap ones and stick to name brands. This something Phil might be interested in - Sony DVD players that don't officially support CD-R will play Prime Peripherals brand CD-Rs. My brother has such a player and he can play anything I burn on this brand on his Sony DVD player. Office Max sells them in boxes of 50 for $14, which is a heck of a deal. They're 80 min. CD-Rs, by the way. As a general rule, avoid cheap, no name CD-Rs and stick to main brands. Prime Peripherals work work in everything I've tried them in that supports CD-R and also Sony players will play them when they won't play anything else except CD-RW. Kodak is a pretty good brand.I have used TDK, but they use a dye that a lot of DVD players are reported to have problems with. Hope this helps.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), February 15, 2002.

This being an oft-spoken about subject here I have to say it's simple, really: just as one would NOT lop off a toe to fit a shoe, so should one STOP trying to find out which CD-R/RW brand/model it is that a certain old or otherwise difficult and picky DVD player will accept. It is noble indeed getting to figure out that a Sony player WILL accept Prime Peripherals but the latter will NOT exist continuously in stock, and playing such can marginalize that hateful player's performance, etc. Far better to get a DVD player THAT officially and reliably do read ALL sorts of CD-R/RW media. With DVD players commodities these days (not the US$1000 items they were five years ago) this shouldn't be a difficult decision to make.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), February 18, 2002.

I agree with Mehmet. For 129USD (Circuit City, Wal-Mart) you can get an Apex AD-5131 DVD Player (3-disc carousel). It's cheap and the remote sucks, but it'll play nearly anything (Maybe even read 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. Haven't tried yet :). And when I say "nearly anything", I mean DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD, SVCD, XSVCD, CDA, and, if that's not enough, MP3 (not CDA, but ISO9960 or Joliet, computer readable file formats with folder tree perusal). Now you no longer have to spend all of your money and time looking for that special CD-R or CD-RW disc manufacturer that may or, most likely, may not work in your current DVD Player.

-- Robert Templeton (templer@vplayground.com), February 22, 2002.