Super VCDs

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 2/8/03 at 10:44 AM, David Thrasher <idave at earthlink.net> transmitted
the following electronic message:

>This may or may have not been discussed already but does anyone know
>if there's anything available to make a Super Video CD on a Mac? I'd
>like to find a way. I'm currently using Mac OS 9.22 most of the time
>and I also have OS 10.1.5 installed (can't swing Jaguar yet). Toast
>with make 1.0 Video CDs which uses MPEG-1 and looks a little bit worse
>than a VHS videotape recorded in the 6 hour (EP) mode. I've check
>Roxio's website and I've checked the vcdhelp website
>(http://www.vcdhelp.com) but I find no Mac instructions for the Super
>Video CD format (VCD version 2.0). Although you can't put as much on
>each CD, the quality is close to DVD quality (sorry, can't afford to
>do DVDs at this time either) since it uses MPEG-2 files too. Any
>instructions or links would be appreciated. Thanks!
>

Yes, there are a couple of ways to make SVCDs, but you have a
fundamental misimpression in your post. Super VCDs are MPEG-2 based
encodings and VCD 2.0 is still MPEG-1 based (the major differences
between 2.0 and 1.4 are related to the support files on the disk).

I make SVCDs coming out of iMovie by exporting to Full Quality DV and
then feeding that to ffmpeg (currently using 0.0.6e), with the output
format set to SVCD NTSC (there's also SVCD PAL). ffmpeg does it's thing,
calling various tools (such as YUVscaler and mencode) to produce the
MPEG-2 files I desire and the image files to burn in Toast (Multitrack
CD-ROM XA format.

--Dennis Cohen
  iLife Bible (April/May 2003)
  iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, & iDVD Bible
  MacOS X Bible