SVCD burning problems

[CarlosW]

Hi:
I started burning SVCDs. My goal is to create CDs that can be played on my Philips 711 standalone player.
The SVCD are playable, but the DVD player's clock doesn't show the right timing (33min against a 55min SVCD) and fast forward (and backward) just hangs the player.
Another much minor annoyance is that the thumbnail menu generated with Nero 5518 seems to be in PAL (what looks awful on NTSC TV sets).

This player was tested with a NTSC SVCD test CD downloaded from the web (created with Enreach I-Author), and found capable of playing with right display times & FF-Rew (the download had neither menus nor subtitles)
I encode in SVCD with TMPG 12a (playable on my PC with the Matrox Ravisent codec)
I burn the SVCD with Nero (tried versions 5.0.2.3 & 5.5.1.8)
In www.doom9.net read a hint about remuxing the mpg2 with bbMPEG, but it didn't work.

Any clue would be much appreciated.
Thank you.

[FM]

Check firmware version of your player. If it is lower then 7.12, you will have these problems. Search Internet to find upgraded firmware. Philips players can be easily upgraded with home-burned cd-r.

[Sciascia]

http://doom9.org/Old_news/Soft1/mpg/mpg2mps_003b.zip
This is a muxer that should help you. Ihaven't tried it myself but this is a common problem. Muxing SVCD copliant streams is not a strength of TMPGEnc, I've never gotten it to work properly. I use I-Author which works great. It is outrageously over-priced and I believe that it is only available in Chinese these days.

[Phil Pugh]

I have a Philips DVD711 and have created many menued SVCD's - but had lots of problems to start with.

First - I found the various 'demo' SVCD files didn't work with menus. The 711 is VERY picky about the SVCD specs - go over the max SVCD bit rate and it won't play! Invariably these demos have been created with older transcoders and authoring s/w.

So how do I do it now...

I use miniDV camcorder, RAPTOR 'capture' card and MSP 6.0.0.2 for editing. Create the AVI (one or more) at full size/max resolution if doing analogue capture.

TMPEng V12a with the PAL SVCD template works fine then use NERO 5.5 to create menued SVCD's - this will create the correct sized MPEG 2 with audio at the right rate.

I have recently bought the Ulead DVD Plugin for MSP 6 and this really inpresses me. From MSP I can create the SVCD MPEG 2 and then burn the final SVCD with very neat multi-level menus. These play very nicely in my 711. It does VCDs also - but why bother - the SVCD quality is VERY good.

BTW you can only get about 30ish mins of real SVCD on a CD-R. Also if you are seeing the time on the 711 Front Panel then the menu wasn't created correctly or you have disabled the PBC (play back control) on the 711. With PBC disabled it doesn't 'play' the menu page.

My suggestion - go to www.jamsoft.com/tmpgenc and download the TMPGEnc v12a kit with English patch - makes it useable for non-japanese readers!

Try a short (5 mins max) video with the default SVCD template (PAL or NTSC) and burn a CD-RW with NERO 5.5 or WIN OnCD 3.8 - both do SVCD menus.