I sold a VCD on eBay. The person who bought it received it, and then tells me that it doesn't play right on her DVD player, SONY DVP-S550D or the DVD-RAM DRIVE on her HP Pavillion 780. She says she has "780c" but I only found Pavillion "780n".

She tells me that the audio and the video isn't synchronized, and that there's a lot of freeze-ups.

I've already checked the DVD player's compatibility against VCD's and it is compatible. I'm still checking on the DVD-RAM DRIVE at HP website.

Here's where the story gets interesting. She says there's a scratch on the bottom of the VCD. I didn't send it scratched, but she says it is.

My question is this, if there is a scratch on the bottom of the VCD (I'm pretty sure all CD's are read from the bottom), would that produce that effect with synchronization and freeze-ups? Or is it just compatibility, and compatibility only that produces such undesirable effects?

-- Y.D. Kang (justbrw@talentg.com), March 20, 2002

Answers

It is possible that the scratch is producing the synchronization issue, however, most scratches will cause a skipping effect or the picture will freeze. Synchronization issues are usually related to software used to create the VCD. If you have a poor copy of the original file that will be converted to VCD, and you do some conversions inbetween, that might cause an issue as well on some players. She can also have an issue with the DVD decoder software used on her PC,I used to have cinemaster 98 player on my laptop which did not work well with the region hack, and produced lots of disturbace, once I changed it to windvd player, all issues were resolved. If that fails, send a fresh copy and hope for the best.

D

-- Dariusz (spyder5029@aol.com), March 25, 2002.