I have Apex 600A dvd player, after I burn a SVCD thru nero 5.0, everything is sucessful.
but we I put it in the APEX 600A player, it can not play, it label as SVCD on the screen.
Does anybody have this problem? How did you solve the problem? I need your help, thanks
by the way it was a CDR disc, i have problem with CDRW on nero 5.0 problem, please help

I believe this is a problem with the firmware. You can either update the firmware ( and loose de-macro and de-region ) or in nero select mpegav directory structure when creating a new disk ( only availible in newer nero versions ).

Good luck

eric at snowmoon dot com

I have an apex 600a and it doesn't always play discs the first time.

1)wait until after the svcd message clears
2)press a track number
3)if a hand comes up, than you need to open and close
the tray (sometimes it takes a couple of times for
this to work), try again

I am not sure but I think PBS must be on also.

There are two kinds of firmware upgrades possible -- the player itself, and the DVD drive unit. I have a 600A mfr 9/99 with LD10 drive firmware. I could not play SVCDs. When I upgraded to LD12, I was able to. I still have the old player firmware.

Also -- the 600A does much better with SVCDs burned with WinOnCD than with Nero.

...Nero produces SVCDs that my Raite715 barely plays, takes three tried to load most of the time and the time disaply is completely off

I am also having the same problem of my Apex 600A player not playing SVCDs. Has anyone used I-Author and then compared the directory structure with a Nero-burnt SVCD? I am just wondering if there is a file or directory missing with the Nero burn that the 600A is looking for. I had a simular problem with WinDVD not playing SVCDs that didn't contain a SEGMENT folder. Once I added this folder, WinDVD worked fine. I am currently using VCDXBuild (from VCDImager) to burn my SVCDs with great success on my Apex 500W. But when I place the SVCD into my 600A (with special firmware), I get the SVCD label on the screen and I can't press any button (except the stop button) without getting the hand. If I press the stop button and then the play button, I get an Invalid Entry message. It is one of the older 600A models.

As an old Apex 600-a user, I can tell you. You have two options. Use I-Author and burn with ezcd creator V4.5 or lower using CIF. This procedure allways worked perfectly for me. The other thing is to burn VCD's using nero. You can get fantastic results encoding with Procoder. Do not mess with the 600-a. You will lose the hidden menu a valuable asset.
"All The Best"
CaptKrunch

Thanks CaptKrunch, but I guess I'm just trying to figure out what I_Author is trying to do (without spending loads of money) that makes it all work ok with the 600A. Does it make the SVCD look like a VCD (directory structure and naming) or is it also modifying the SVCD headers to make the stream look like a VCD? For all I know, it isn't possible to view a real SVCD on this unit because the firmware is faulty. I was just wondering if anyone found just what the 600A is searching for on the CD in order to play it as a SVCD.

vcdhelp.com and other sites have guides for using I-Author. imho it produces the best svcd. You can find it if you search the web. By the way the old 600-A will not read DVD-r either but I still stand by my earlier post.
CaptKrunch

I would suject if your DVD Player has the Capibility to play SVCD"s But won"t play them because the File stucture is slightly different than VCD is to Burn SVCD"s AS VCD"s, You can do this By Either Putting a VCD Header on the SVCD File or what Might be easier is to just disable compliance checking in Nero and Burn it as a VCD, I know disks like this Play Fine in my DVD Player...cheers

Except for its use of the MPEGAV directory for the video file which is not compliant with SVCD standards, I-Author makes compliant SVCDs. Nero does not. They are close enough for most players, but not all. The differences are very technical and quite complicated. If you do a web search, there is a program called VCDimager. It has some large documentation with it that describes in gory detail what VCD and SVCD need in their various subdirectories. If you look at it you could probably figure out what Nero does wrong, but I doubt they'll ever fix it. Nero has never fixed the FF/REW and time search paradox (you can have one of these work but not both on most players). You could also consider getting a copy of VCDeasy at http://www.doom9.net and burning with it as it also makes compliant SVCDs like I-Author does (well, except for the MPEGAV thing).

I have an old Apex 600A and out of the box as originally built and shipped it did not support SVCD at all. Certain versions of the unit, depending on the firmware chip, can be upgraded to offer such support. Have you ever considered that maybe you could just spend $50 for a DVD player that does support SVCD instead of knocking yourself out trying to make Nero work on the 600A? It's your life and time, but it's not anything I'd be interested in doing. It will take up a lot of your time to do this and in the end you may fail, but good luck if you decide to try it.

Thanks everyone, but I think some of you are missing the point. I am using VCDXBuild (from VCDImager) currently and it makes very good SVCDs. I was just wondering if the 600a was looking for a specific file within the SVCD structure to actually make it work on the 600a. Nero has never created a quality SVCD, imho, and I only use it for creating VCDs. I have a decent XML script that I use with VCDXBuild to create my SVCDs for viewing on my other Apex (500W). I was just hoping to be able to view the same SVCD on both Apex DVD players (with working FF/REW and correct time elapsed, which don't show correctly when viewed as a pseudo-VCD.)

Fair enough, but if you look at our responses, you will see that a bigger issue is whether the 600A will play SVCD or not without a firmware upgrade. Typically it did not. About 5% of the models have a specific chip that can not be firmware upgraded. Unfortunately, I have one of those I don't believe that the Apex is looking for a specific file, I think it's a lack of support for the format in firmware that is causing your problem. Apex players typically don't enforce the SVCD standards very rigidly so you can get away with a lot of stuff that's not quite right and they'll still play. That makes me think that firmware is your problem. If you want to look into a firmware upgrade, check out http://www.nerd-out.com/darrenk

This is what I had suspected for a while. I do have one that was "upgraded" to include the special menu. Since I have the 500W, which has also been "upgraded", it just may be time to "downgrade" the 600A to a new version of the firmware and see if that will work. I just wanted to make sure that all SVCD formatting issues were tried and tested before changeing the firmware (since I don't have a ROM burner available anymore and I can't find the original ROM since I moved.)

Thanks everyone for all of your responses.

I finally figured out why my Apex 600A would not play my SVCDs. It turns out that the 600A does not like the following files: LOT.SVD and PSD.SVD

These files are located in the SVCD directory. These files are only required when using menus or multiple mpg files. Since I have been only burning single mpg files, these 2 .SVD files are not needed. I removed the "pbc" section from the XML file and created the bin/cue files with vcdimager. Works like a champ.

Just figured I would pass this on to everyone else.