Page 1 of Scan SC2000 good for VCD play

I have now tried to play a few home-made VCD in my Scan SC2000 player. So far so good, it is faultless.

I made a very standard VCD, using a VCD structure for my Mpeg file as well as the standard bitrate for video and sound.

And I also made one VCD with a slightly higher bitrate than normal with a 128 Kbps stereo stream (BTW it`s a mistake because it is a bit flaky in the treble sounds, one must not forget that the VCD sound is encoded in mp2 not in mp3, therefore 128Kbps is not as good as for a mp3 file).

I did as well one VCD with a lower bitrate (in order to fit a 1H29 show on a 80min CDR). For the audio I also choosed a 192kbps Mono stream encoding instead of a 224Kbps Stereo encoding (fine quality).

In both cases the mpg file had not a standard VCD structure, for obvious reasons. I burned the CDs with Nero 5, with the flag "Make Standard VCD" NOT set (not exactly sure of the text of the flag, but this is something like that).

The result is perfect. No glitches of any sort, fast forward up to 16x, very quick access to a particular point of the movie by typing a time with the remote. The picture is as good as the VCD permits (nearly as good as the VHS tapes I used as a source).

I find this is a great feature if you have some tapes you want to backup on VCD. In fact tapes vanishes with time, whereas a VCD will stay better, and you can do two copies just in case (that`s what I do because I know that a CD-R can abruptly stop to be readable, when one fails I use the other one to do another copy). And in the future, when a better format will be available it will be possible to convert them to what the new format will be and the quality will certainly not decrease.

Should the SCAN be able to play `video singles` e.g. `Bob the Builder`? Or do you need a PC to play the video?

I`m not sure about `Bob the Builder`. However if you mean a CD single which sometimes has a few audio tracks and a video in an mpeg and/or Qtime format then I don`t think so. I have tried a few and the SCAN plays the audio tracks but then the video confuses the player because it expects an audio track. I don`t think that a CD single with a video file conforms to any real standard CD format, therefore the SCAN doesn`t know what to do with it.
If you blow the video onto a VCD format CD then it will play. I have done this sucessfully with WinOnCD 3.7PE and 3.8PE and also Nero 5.0.3x.
`Bob the Builder` ?

My flatmate bought a couple of old CD-i video cds once - Beverly Hills Cop and The Naked Gun (which gives you some idea of the age of them) - I reckon the picture quality on my Scan was pretty damn good - not a patch on broadcast tv or DVD, but better than vhs easily.