VCD/SVCD movie breaks up halfway through - detailed description inside.

Hi all - hope someone can help me with this because it's driving me nuts. I'll try to describe the problem as best I can.

The problem: On all the VCD's and SVCD's I encode from Divx Avi files the picture starts to break up halfway through my movie. What happens is the movie starts off fine, then (almost precisely) at the halfway mark small pixel patches start flickering on to the screen. The patchiness starts getting progressively worse, eventually the picture breaks down almost completely and the sound starts breaking up as well. This has happened on EVERY VCD and SVCD I've encoded and almost exactly at the halfway mark of my movie (e.g CD1 of Monsters, Inc has 45 mins of video on it. At 20 minutes the image starts gradually breaking up, and is completely gone by minute 25 and for the rest of the film).

What I use: My divx files (good quality PAL, 720x578 @ about 2,300 kbits). These go into AVI2SVCD (1.1.3 build 2) and are encoded using Cinema Craft 2.50 multipass VBR (3 times) and safe mode (frameserving). First 4 settings in CCE MPEG2 advanced options are unselected. I don't create an image, just take the resulting mpg file and burn it at 4x using VCDEasy (1.1.5). In VCDeasy I use the Nero ASPI (Adaptec also available) and CDRDAO for authoring, and the generic mmc driver. I use 700MB CD's and my player is a Comet 3838 DVD/SVCD/VCD player.

Hardware: WinXP, 256MB Memory, 1,6 GHz P4, Matshita UJDA720 DVD/CDRW (its a Toshiba laptop)

Things to note:
I have used both AVI2SVCD/VCDEasy and Ulead's VideoStudio on separate trials to encode/burn the same file. Same problem every time.
I have used different divx avi's in case this one was corrupt - same problem every time.
When the mpg file is played on my computer, it plays fine - not a single glitch.
I haven't tried ripping a DVD with DVD2SVCD and burning an SVCD yet to see if the problem exists there as well.

My own deductions: Since 2 different programs (DVD2SVCD/VCDeasy and VideoStudio) seem to produce the same problem on my DVD player it is either most likely a) some common setting in both programs that is creating the problem (wild guess: should I use MPEGAV instead of MPEG2 and entrysvd instead of entryvcd for example?) OR b)my DVD player has the problem. But that's as far as my own logic will take me. I haven't used VCDEasy all that much so I don't really know if the settings are creating the problem or if the problem is further back, i.e. during encoding or in the divx avi itself.

If anyone has had this problem or has a solution for it, I would be very, VERY grateful.

JDC

 

Ok...Looking at bbMpeg now - Offset is 2 secs and overlap is unselected. Problem is though, i had exactly the same issue with Videostudio - halfway through starts falling apart faster than a cheap suit. What about MPEGAV / Entryvcd? Any issues that might be lurking there? As far as I can tell, they're the only features that both DVD2SVCD and Videostudio have in common.
Thx
JDC