VCD Creation

[SirPeale]

I have some video files that I'm tring to convert to VCD format.  I've heard that TMPGEnc is a good program to use, but I'm finding that it's not converting properly.  There's no audio, and each file is over 600M.  I'd like to be able to fit more than one twenty minute episode on a CD (three would be great).  I can drag/drop the files with Nero, and it converts them, but there's a lot of compression artifacts I think I could polish out if it would take the time to do so.

Should I not be using this program?  Is there a better one?  Esp. since I haven't been able to even get the files with audio.

[ChadTower]

I have a freeware tool at home I used once... worked pretty well, hard to tell the quality of the algorithm since the source wasn't great quality.  Head over to videohelp.com and look there, that's where I got it.  I forget the name.

[melarky]

I used to make a ton of VCDs (I have almost all of the MST3K episodes in MPEG4 on my computer and I would make them VCDs so I could watch them on my DVD player on the big tv).

I used TMPGEnc to encode it into a MPEG Layer 1, and then I used a program called VCD Easy to actually burn it to a disk (it lets you do things like set chapters etc... on VCDs.  I would usually just place a chapter every 5 minutes so I could easily skip around the disk if I needed to).

I actually got all of the information I needed from the community that distributes the MST3K episodes (http://dapcentral.org).  It looks like they may have changed the way they do it now in their FAQ (I did this a long time ago, and I no longer have to do it because my DVD player will now play the MPEG4 files), but you could probably get some useful information by going to http://dapcentral.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=FAQ&file=index&myfaq=yes&id_cat=7

Hope that helps, I remember it was sort of a pain to have to goof with all of that stuff, once I got it working right I just sort of stopped playing with it or upgrading software (didn't want to risk breaking it as it was so tedious to get it to work in the first place).

[ChadTower]

I need to figure out what app I used, but when I did it, I just popped a DVD in one drive, a CD in the other, and a few clicks and two hours later I had a VCD copy of the DVD.