V for VCD

Ok... That was a looooooooong testing. I did some readup on VCDs. Green book, White book,... Dropped green book as only philips CDI player really like it. Looks like there are only very few standards for white book. VCD-NTSC, VCD-PAL, VCD-FILM and SuperVCD bersions of the 3. Each one got one very exact defined MPEG1 datastream. The catch is that there are a huge number of VCDs that do not follow that specs. The 1 million $ question would be how far can I get away from the specs and have most players work. (Which means my failed VCD is indeed a correct one, just that my players are too picky...) Anyhow I did not want to try and stuck with 100% standard this time. Unfortunately that means a VCD can only carry 74 minutes of video. So one WCATV episode needs 250MB or so... With less quality then the MPEG4s that is. Much less. Looks pretty ugly on PC screen, but about about par with a VHS tape on TV. Anyhow as that would have ment 5 VCDs for WCA I dropped that project and instead did convert the audio visual presskit to a VCD as it is only 30 mins. A better test. Filled the rest with WC game ads. Then I had the next problem that for whatever reason Divx movies started to grow pink when converted to MPEG. Needed 2 days to find a fix (had a bug on my system - should not happen to you). Anyhow I finally did the conversion. What do you know the VCD worked :) Looked pretty ugly on PC as I said, but not too bad on TV.

Ok, for the tech stuff... I found a lot of useful stuff at http://www.moviesoftware.net/ About every converter, codec, etc. you need is there...

Also found a great converter, TMPGEnc, there. Newest version at it's homepage here: http://www.tmpgenc.com/

That beast is small, fast and full of features. In fact it is only slightly worse then the best (commercial) ones. Awesome tool. If it could write MOV and also do read/write RM I'd be in love ;) I really like that proggy. It even has the VCD formats predefined. BTW: You know of any RM to whatever (AVI, MOV, MPG,...) converter?

Finally you need a VCD capable burning software. I used ahead Nero Burning Rom 4.0.9.1 Demo (an ancient version on my HD) for that. You should be able to get a 30 day trial for free. Look here: http://www.ahead.de/en/demo.asp Wow, version 5.0 already... Mmm, no idea what changed. Anyhow it is easy to use, you should not have problems with that version as well I expect.

Well I think that is all. IF you got any questions, ask...

Karl "CFF" Frank