How do I create a VideoCD from AVI or MPEG files?
This section assumes you already have the video captured on the hard drive of your computer. If you don’t know how to do that, read the previous section. The goal is to create a White Book VideoCD, which can be viewed on any VideoCD-compatible playback device. Most PCs and Macs have some amount of support, as do many DVD players, so even if you can’t find a dedicated VideoCD player or CD-i box you should be able to find a way to watch them. VideoCDs can only be read by CD-ROM drives capable of reading CD-ROM/XA discs. If your drive doesn’t claim to support PhotoCD, you’re probably out of luck, but this is rare except on very old hardware. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (formerly ActiveMovie) and Apple’s Video Player can play movies off of a VideoCD. Depending on the software you have installed, you may get a player with a nice UI, or you may need to examine the disc manually and open the “.dat” files in the “mpegav” directory. Depending on the drivers you have installed, Linux system
This section assumes you already have the video captured on the hard drive of your computer. If you don’t know how to do that, read the previous section. The goal is to create a White Book VideoCD, which can be viewed on any VideoCD-compatible playback device. Most PCs and Macs have some amount of support, as do many DVD players, so even if you can’t find a dedicated VideoCD player or CD-i box you should be able to find a way to watch them. VideoCDs can only be read by CD-ROM drives capable of reading CD-ROM/XA discs. If your drive doesn’t claim to support PhotoCD, you’re probably out of luck, but this is rare. Microsoft’s ActiveMovie (now Windows Media Architecture) and Apple’s Video Player can play movies off of a VideoCD. Depending on the software you have installed, you may get a nice player, or you may need to examine the disc manually and open the “.dat” files in the “mpegav” directory. If you were hoping to play your VideoCD on a DVD player, you should read about VideoCD and CD-
(2004/09/05) This section assumes you already have the video captured on the hard drive of your computer. If you don’t know how to do that, read the previous section. The goal is to create a White Book VideoCD, which can be viewed on any VideoCD-compatible playback device. Most PCs and Macs have some amount of support, as do many DVD players, so even if you can’t find a dedicated VideoCD player or CD-i box you should be able to find a way to watch them. VideoCDs can only be read by CD-ROM drives capable of reading CD-ROM/XA discs. If your drive doesn’t claim to support PhotoCD, you’re probably out of luck, but this is rare except on very old hardware. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (formerly ActiveMovie) and Apple’s Video Player can play movies off of a VideoCD. Depending on the software you have installed, you may get a player with a nice UI, or you may need to examine the disc manually and open the “.dat” files in the “mpegav” directory. Depending on the drivers you have installed,
(2002/11/22) This topic is largely outside the scope of this FAQ, so I’m not going to go into much depth. The Usenet newsgroup news:rec.desktop.video is more applicable. I’m not aware of an FAQ for that group, but the links found at http://www.videoguys.com/jump.htm will get you started. You need a capture device to transfer the video to your hard drive. Capturing high-quality video can eat up 2MB or more per *second* of video at full resolution (640x480x24 at 60 fields per second for NTSC) with a reasonable degree of compression, so this isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. The lower your quality requirements, the lower the bandwidth requirements. On a fast machine, you can even get away with just a TV tuner card, using the software from http://www.winvcr.com/. If MPEG is your only interest, you might be better off with an MPEG-only card rather than a hobbyist video capture board. http://www.b-way.com/ and http://www.darvision.com/ are good places to look. The Broadway card has b
This section assumes you already have the video on your computer. If you don’t know how to do that, read the previous section. If you want to try creating a White Book VideoCD, which can be viewed on a VideoCD playback device like a Philips CD-i or from a computer with appropriate hardware and software, CD-R software packages like Easy CD Creator and WinOnCD can write MPEG-1 movies onto a CD in the necessary format. You have to be careful when creating the MPEGs, because if the encoding parameters (frame rate, number of pixels, etc) don’t match the VideoCD parameters you may have trouble getting the CD writing software to accept the movie. John Schlichther’s “avi2vcd” combines standard tools into an easy-to-use program for Win95 and NT. You can use it to convert an AVI file into a VideoCD-compatible stream. http://www.mnsi.net/~jschlic1/. Another choice is TMPGEncoder, from http://www.tmpgenc.com/e_main.html. If you’re running Linux you should take a look at Bernhard Schwall’s “avi2yuv
