burning with K3b, track 1 loops back

[kitandkaboodle]

Using K3b 1.91.0 on Lucid in order to burn multitrack Video CDs.
These burned fine before, and I made 5 working ones.

Now having weird playback problem of burned VCDs first track looping back to the beginning instead of automatically advancing to later tracks. Same problem occurs on a variety of players including standalone DVD player. I can manually access the later tracks, but the later tracks don't continue automatically from track one.

The funny thing is that I'm using exactly the same mpeg VCD files that worked successfully before.

I've got a feeling that the problem is some setting in K3b that I might have unintentionally changed, or else some nuance to how I'm adding the files to the project. I notice that when I add tracks to the project, a funny line always appears under a file name. Could that have anything to do with this problem? Also, would choosing "DAO" rather than "Auto" fix the problem? I'm tired of wasting the nice archival CD-Rs I bought!

Any suggestions appreciated.

[ehawk]

I have seen some forum discussions of problems where it was thought that the player was the cause of the problem, or how the player interacted with the results of a particular burner, talk of "smart modes".

Since you think it is due to a changed setting, could you simply uninstall/reinstall the burner, and possibly the player, to see if it fixes things.

You could also try a different combination of burners/players. These things should be pretty quick to do, especially with a distribution using package management.

[kitandkaboodle]

Thanks for tips. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling k3b to do the reversion to defaults, but still same problem. So basically I can burn many VCD (mpeg1 video) files to burn a VCD in k3b, but they won't automatically play one after another for a "long play". Have to use the "forward next" button to reach all the files one at a time.

Tried to work around this by combining all the files into one continuous VCD formatted track using Openshot. Results in a "mpeg1video" file (that's the actual name of the extension) from Openshot, but now k3b is not recognizing/admitting such files for it's VCD burning projects. Even if I change the file extension to simply "mpeg", k3b still doesn't admit the file.

Tried some different burning software as well. Brasero and CD/DVD Creator, both of which have no explicit VCD options. That resulted in some success reading the burn from Ubuntu's Movie Player, but no success with standalone vcd/dvd player, which simply said "No audio found. No video found."

Am just at a loss at how to do something that--as you say--seems like it should be easy: burn a "long-play" VCD with various VCD-formatted mpeg files on it.

[ehawk]

Hi,

Do these burner/player applications have forums or mailling lists associated with them. Might be able to get help from the experts.

Since you are able to click for "next/forward" maybe it would be possible to write a script that would play each of the tracks sequentially. Can you type the application name and file to be played at the command line and get results?

(player application) (filename)

If so, then it should be easy to write and run a script to play all of them, one command after another. Can you go into the directory and simply type

(player application name) *

This might play all of them in the order the appear in the directory. Then you could write a script with a command line for each filename and play them in the order you wanted.