Info and forum posts by 'ppravier'

Scan SC2000 firmwares 2.14 & 2.23 buggy with VCDs

I just tried the firmware 2.14 & 2.23. They are buggy with VCDs. In fact the reading is very choppy. VCDs on which it happens have not a high datarate, they are close to the standard.
Reverting back to the v1.93 solved the problem. But of course the odd mp3 glitches are back ...

Where is the web site with firmwares for Scan SC2000 ?

Any official or un-official sites ?

RE: SCAN SC2000 WISH LIST

NIVZ`s list is very good.
I give it my vote.

RE: Scan SC-2000 and R2 Disney Disks

I can confirm you that the R2 Disney disks is solved by the firmware 2.14 . In fact I can now play "Alice in wonderland" correctly again.

However the skipping problem in Fantasia 2000 remains.
I spotted two regions where it occurs very often :
0h 58min 10s to 0h 58min 20s
1h 05min 28s to 1h 05min 36s

When such a freeze occurs I hear the DVD drive doing seeking noises. Something strange happens then. Because somebody else said that his Fantasia 2000 had the same problems I don`t believe this is my disc which is faulty. I have this problem from the very beginning; using this brand new disc.

RE: Scan SC2000 - Problems - Help

It seems very similar to the problem I have with Fantasia 2000. At a few points of the CD the image and sounds freezes for a short time (half a second maybe). I can reproduce the problem easily, although it happens maybe in 75% of my attempts. I know that it can happen on different moments of the movie, so this is not a layer change. It happened on a single-layer disc anyway as well. In Fantasia 2000 I know some locations where it is likely to happen.
On a few DVDs I rented it happened as well.
This is a very annoying problem. Like you I wonder if the player needs to be replaced or not.
Concerning Fantasia 2000 I wonder if I am the only one to hav e this problem, unfortunately nobody seems to have this DVD.

In your case, can you reproduce the problem ? Did you find locations on the discs where it is likely to happen ?

It doesn`t seem to be related to R1 discs because my discs are R2.

RE: sc-2000 region 2 disney problem disks

"Alice in Wonderland" has strong problems as well. Extreme jerkiness, big blocks, completely crap with the 2.x firmwares.

RE: Mico A980 or Scan SC-2000?

The Scan can at least do XVCD because it can plays VCD that have non-standard bitrates (1150Kbits video + 224Kbits audio).
I can play without problems a VCD encoded at 1000 + 192 Kbits (I did that to fit a 1h27 show on a 80min CD-R). It plays as well a VCD encoded at 1690 + 224 Kbits without any glitches.

So absolutely no problems for that, but I didn`t go as far as Carrot concerning this aspect.....


Mp3-wise it plays any bitrate, in any form (Constant and variable bit rates). The quality is excellent, I checked with my headphones several times on a lot of examples). The firmware 2.04 and above corrects the sound glitches that I detected in the 1.93 version. So now this is perfect.
Long filenames are coming soon. The display is fine, with a sort of explorer displaying your directories and with which you can browse your CD. It is very quick to recognize the CD by the way.

RE: Scan SC-2000 DVD Player - When can we expect a fix for the

Same problem for "Alice in wonderland". Starting from the firmware 2.04 I get an unreadable picture with blocks, and scrambled sounds.
Reverting back to the 1.93 firmware cancels the problem, so this is not a disc issue but a firmware issue.

RE: What would you like to see on the next firmware upgrade for the SC-2000 scan player ?

Ability to play all the Disney R2 DVDs !

RE: Scan SC2000 Firmware 2.08 experiences

And what about the corrupted Disney R2 playback (bug appeared with the firmware 204) ??

RE: Scan SC2000 & Firmware 2.08 : no changes since 2.04

Unfortunately no.

Scan SC2000 & Firmware 2.08 : no changes since 2.04

I just upgraded the firmware to 2.08 from the 2.04 version.

Unfortunately none of my problems are solved by this version. I checked of course that I had actually upgraded by looking at the blue screen.

Problems are :
- Complete breakup of the picture in "Alice in Wonderland".
- Sound skips in Fantasia 2000 between 00h58:10 and 00h58:20, not always but frequently. It skips at a few other places in the disk as well.
- Some ID3 tags are not read from mp3 files. It doesn`t seem to be related to a particular type of file.

The first two problems are becoming extremely urgent and becomes a bit ridiculous, especially the completely corrupted picture I obtain in "Alice in Wonderland". I hope that it will be fixed soon.

RE: mp3 burning

Yes, you can use any current CD-Burning software anyway.
For easily accessing the files on a DVD player it`s better to create a folder for each album you`ll want to have on your CDR.

In order to transfer from CD-Audio to Mp3 I can suggest you Xing Audio-Catalyst , which can get the titles automatically from CDDB, can use the VBR type of compression (which is better than the usual Constant bitrate compression), and is very quick even at its higher quality settings.

RE: Scan SC2000 good for DVD playback, only a few glitches :

Is it possible to have several layer changes in the same disc ? As I said I have this problem in two parts of the movie.

RE: REPLACEMENT SCAN -WORSE THAN FIRST ONE!!!!!!!!!!!

I`m glad to know that the Pioneer has this capability. In my previous mesage I didn`t mean that all the branded players can`t play CD-R/W. But most of them can`t. I suppose the Sony line is a great example.

With Philips, Pioneer seems to be the brand that puts a lot of efforts in providing all these extra features. However, what about mp3 replay with these ? And if they do, do they do that properly with all the different variations of this format (something that is never tested correctly) ?

RE: Letterbox on Scan and matrix pain

It has in fact to be programmed in the DVD. Unfortunately the movie makers don`t do that often.
If you have a 2:35 movie, and therefore wide black bands, I think that the zoom function is fine (at the X2 setting) because it will be close to fit eh imag in width. It means that you`ll loose of course pictures from the sides, but not from the height.
Whatever you do anyway you`ll have to loose some bit of pictures, unless you want to stretch it, therefore loosing the aspect ratio.

RE: mp3 burning

What I can say about nero is that you can download a trial version at www.nero.com, which is the nero` site.
This version works during 30 days without restrictions.

It`s a vry good program form sure. However I don`t think it does something different from other burning software when you want to burn mp3 files on a CD-R. There is nothing particular in this matter.

However if your concern is to encode mp3 files, from an audio-cd for example, this a very different matter. What do you want to do ?

RE: SCAN SC2000 - Total picture breakup on old Disney R2

How did you get rid of the problem ?

RE: REPLACEMENT SCAN -WORSE THAN FIRST ONE!!!!!!!!!!!

Apart from mp3, another good ability of the scan that branded machines usually don`t have is the ability to read CD-R , XVCD, SVCD .
This is very important for me, counting as much as the DVD replay.

RE: SCAN SC2000 - Total picture breakup on old Disney R2

I can confirm this problem with one of my Region-2 Disney DVD : Alice in Wonderland.
When I had the 1.92 firmware it was all right. But since I upgraded to 2.04s the picture is completely screwed !
I turned the macrovision off as well, I don`t know if it is linked because I didn`t try to read this DVD with the Macrovision and the 2.04s firmware.

Like Norman Voles I have the same line displayed in the blue screen we have to look to verify the firmware version :
ADV7171 00000003 (should it not be 00000000 or 1)?

I have also still the same hickup problem with Fantasia 2000 (Region 2). Between 00h58:10 and 00h58:20 there is often a freeze during maybe half a second.

This item was edited on Thursday, 18th January 2001, 09:58

RE: Letterbox on Scan and matrix pain

You could use the Zoom function of the Scan player as well.

RE: Scan SC2000 with new firmware 204s : mp3 playback is excellent now.

Yes CD-R are not expensive anymore, maybe I kept an old habit of 5 years ago when they were more than 5 pounds each !

RE: Scan SC2000 with new firmware 204s : mp3 playback is excellent now.

As Xeno said the forward/rewind facilities when playing mp3 files are in fact less sticky than with the 192 firmware. That`s another good point.

What is this counter problem that appeared with the 2.04 firmware ? I watched a DVD movie last evening and the counter was going well. The counter displayed on the TV while you listen to mp3 was going well too (I didn`t look at the LCD display though).

RE: Scan SC2000 good for DVD playback, only a few glitches :

Well, I upgraded to the latest firmware which is 204s.

The sound loudness problem is gone. Good.
The brightness problem is gone. Good.

But I have still sound pauses in Fantasia 2000. Not good.
Do someone else have the same problems while watching this movie ? IT happens in "Pump and Circonstances" (Chapter 14) and in "The firebird" (chapter 16, between 00h58:10 and 00h58:20). It does hot happen every time, but if I repeat the sequence twice with the A-B function I am quite sure it will happen.

Scan SC2000 with new firmware 204s : mp3 playback is excellent now.

My tests with the new firmware are very interesting. I upgraded from the 192 to 204s :

ALL my mp3 playback problems are solved. No more flanging on the leading voice, no more problems with the 96 KHz mono files.
The sound has no glitches anymore.
So for that respect, upgrading from firmware 192 to 204s is brilliant.

Quality-wise I can recommend the Scan SC2000 player for mp3 playback, it seems to be able play any type of mp3 without glitches (and I am picky).


By the way, in order not to waste a CD-R for just storing the 512KBytes firmware I began a multisession disc. The first session just contains the firmware. When I created the disc I closed the session, but not the disc itself. The DVD player accepted the disc to upgrade the firmware without difficulties.
Therefore I can now add around 600 MBytes of files in a second session for other purposes. Of course, as it is said in the upgrade doc I created the CD in Mode 2/XA mode, not Mode 1.

RE: Scan SC2000 not too bad for mp3, but ...

My tests with the new firmware are very interesting :

ALL my mp3 playback problems are solved. No more flanging on the leading voice, no more problems with the 96 KHz mono files.
The sound has no glitches anymore.
So for that respect, upgrading from firmware 192 to 204s is brilliant. Quality-wise I can recommend the Scan SC2000 player for mp3 playback, it seems to be able play any type of mp3 without glitches.

RE: Scan SC2000 not too bad for mp3, but ...

Great ! I received the new firmware (2.04s) and the corresponding instructions from Nelley a few minutes ago. I`m looking forward this evening to come back home and upgrade the firmware. Then I`ll do the tests again.

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.

RE: Scan SC2000 not too bad for mp3, but ...

As Nelley suggested I`ll upgrade the firmware. I just sent him the mail asking for that.

As Gary W said the quality is important in making mp3 files. I always use the highest quality settings. I don`t have any mp3 files from Internet (they are ususally crap in fact), I did all them myself by using Audioactive Producer Pro which does a very good job. For producting VBR files I use Xing Audiocatalyst 2.1.
In every case I use the highest quality settings.
It has nothing to do with the player but I agree with him that 128 Kbps is not always good enough. When I encode a file I use 160 or 256 Kbps. When I do that in VBR I choose one of the two highest bps level in Xing, which leads to files being roughly 150-160 Kbsp in average (or more if I choose the highest setting). VBR is better because it uses more data when it`s needed.
For my comparisons with Winamp I use the 2.65 version. I never encountered these problems with Winamp before anyway.

RE: Scan SC2000 not too bad for mp3, but ...

Nobody cares ?