Ok, here's the problem I am having.

A year ago, I got a new DVD/CD Burner combo, a Sony OEM DVD DW-D26A. I also own a Panasonic S35 DVD player. With my old CD burner I burned a lot of VCDs and SVCDs and they played fine on my DVD player (I got a couple of coasters here and there, but otherwise it was ok).

Now, however, none of the SVCDs I've been trying to burn will work on my DVD player. They work fine on my PC and on my in-law's DVD player (some JVC model) but not on mine. On my player the video skips, jumps and is full of artifacts in every frame and the audio is full of chirps, hisses and beeps, some of them threaten to blow my stereo speakers.

I'm running a Linux 2.4 kernel with scsi emulation (kernel module ide-scsi) and using vcdimager and cdrdao 1.2.0 to burn the SVCDs.

When I try to burn, it loads the "generic-mmc" driver and cdrdao reports:

"ERROR: Drive does not accept any cue sheet variant - please report. ERROR: Writing failed"

This problem goes away when I force the use of the "generic-mmc-raw" driver by "--driver generic-mmc-raw", however I think it is the use of the raw driver that is causing my disks to malfunction on my DVD player. Disks I've burned with either my laptop or my old burner (both using the "generic-mmc" driver) work find in my player.

I have tried to find some method or workaround that will allow me to maximize the compatibility of the SVCDs I am producing, but so far nothing I have found has worked.

I have tried burning at 2x, but this makes the disks completely unplayable (nothing but artifacts, skipping video and chirping audio). If I try burning at the max speed (40x for my burner) the situation is much better, the video is almost playable, but there's still artifacts, skips and chirps about every 30 seconds or so.

This is somewhat odd, because everything I've read says to try to burn at a lower speed if you're having compatibility problems.

On another forum I found something regarding Panasonic S35s not liking SVCDs burned using the .cue/.bin format, so I tried using "bin2iso" to convert to an iso and burn it with "cdrecord". I managed to burn it without using the raw driver, but the resulting disk does not play in any device (they all say its format is invalid).

I have also tried various media, from no-name CD-Rs to Fujitsu gold photo CD-Rs and it makes no difference.

My burner is currently using the JYS1 firmware, and I have found updates for JYS2 firmware, but I'm reluctant to try flashing the drive without knowing what the JYS2 changelog is...

I believe the problem is caused by two things:
1) Using the "generic-mmc-raw" driver.
2) An older DVD player with less error checking.

Has anyone else successfully used a SONY D26A with the "generic-mmc" driver? I don't believe I should be getting the "cue sheet variant" error.
Does anyone know if upgrading my firmware will fix this?
Has anyone seen this kind of problem before?
Any other suggestions?