I have some great old Charlie Chan (among others) movies on VCD’s. They play great on my computer but not good at all on my Apex digital dvd player. The movie starts out great but the audio and video start getting out of sync soon after the movie starts and gets worse and worse until the movie gets impossible to watch. It’s not only the Chan movies but any VCD movie I play in my DVD player. Is there anything I can do to remedy this?
Maybe something is wrong with your DVD player. Does it officially support VCD? Most Apex models do, and are usually quite good about it.
According to
this page, 20 out of the 23 Apex models support VCD. Check it out. Maybe someone has a comment on your specific model number that may be of use.
Also, are your VCDs PAL (Europe, elsewhere) or NTSC (U.S., Japan)? Some NTSC DVD players have trouble with PAL VCDs. In that case, I can only recommend that you get a different model. Players can now be found for under $100 with good PAL to NTSC conversion.
Alternatively, you could copy the large DAT files from the VCD to your hard drive, then rename them as MPG*. From there you can convert to NTSC from PAL. This process can be accomplished entirely with freeware. Expect a little bit of quality loss, though. Consult the vcdhelp.com site linked to in my post for more info. Mods : I’m assuming this is legal, as you’re allowed a backup copy of media for personal use. Also, there is no protection scheme to defeat in order to copy a VCD movie to your hard drive.
*This is the sloppy way to extract. It leaves some VCD headers on the MPG, but from what I’ve read, they should be harmless. There are programs to extract the orginal MPG, sans headers, on vcdhelp.com
After reading this page I find out that I have one of the newer ones that won’t play VCD’s even though the other page says so.
Thanks for all y’all’s help.