KVCD: Compatibility with low budget DVD players?
 

I have a couple of family members with low budget DVD players. the primary 2 are labled Shinsonic but I believe it is the same guts as Apex and Shinco.

I tested the latest compatability CD and the first 3 play. They are all 352x240.

The other three are jerky when played. This is the same problem I have been having with complete movies in any resolution x 480. I have tested several bit rates at 352x480, 480x480 & 528x480. The 528 does not play many times at all... only green blocks and scrambled video. The other two play but have a jerkiness. It seems like a standard pattern and the audio is smooth but the jumpiness is consistent.

I have also tried bumping up the minimum bit rate to 600 with no difference?

I understand it might just be as simple as "don't buy crappy DVD players". But I would like to figure out why the 352x480 does not play but the 352x240 plays.

The players have no problems with regular DVDs and MP3 CDs?

Any ideas are helpful.

Grantman

Hey Grantman,

For the templates on the Compatibility Test CD which cause jerky playback on their machines, try encoding with a 29.97fps framerate instead of the kvcd default of 23.976fps and see if that fixes things. For the x3 template, try changing the resolution to 544x480 instead of 528x480 and see if the picture is no longer a garbled green blocky screen.

My dvd player (Sampo 631CF) has the exact same symptoms you described when attempting to play the KVCD Compatibility Test CD. All of the 352x240 resolution templates play fine on my player (using the templates with their default settings), but all of the other higher-resolution templates require the use of 29.97fps to play properly without skipping/jumping audio and video problems on my player. Yes, it stinks that you'll lose some compression by encoding @29.97fps instead of 23.97fps, but at least it might solve the problem....and you can still usually fit most ~2-hour movies onto 1 disc at an acceptable quality level with the x3 template (FYI, "acceptable" to me is no lower than CQ54). The green garbled screen is also fixed (on my player) by using 544x480 rez.

Hopefully these tricks will work on your family members' players. :)
-d&c