i have a sony davs 500 and had the same problem but you can convert a svcd to vcd by doing the following
How to cheat and convert svcd to vcd quickly (20 mins instead of 3.5hrs
you'll lose a lot of quality re-incoding but we're not gonna re-encode we're simply gonna fool the player into thinking its playing a Vcd and not an Svcd takes around 15-20 minutes tops
You'll need TMPGenc though!
Follow these steps and I guarantee you'll be watching Svcd in the correct format on your Vcd only player
1. Open TMPGEnc and goto FILE>MPEG TOOLS and click on the
Simple Multiplex tab.
2. Click Browse for video input and select your movie.
3. Be sure that the type is MPEG-1 Video-CD (you select this at the top all your doing is changing the header from mpeg2 to mpeg1 not the file ;0)
4. Select you output file.
5. Click Run. This will take 5-10min maybe more depending on video size
and speed of your computer.
6. Now just burn to CD useing Nero or any other burning tool that will burn VCD's
Note: After doing this if you try to play the mpeg on your computer chances are
you will just get is a blocky green screen. Do not worry, this is normal but it will still
play fine in your DVD player
You'll find the correct app under Tools in TMPGenc!