Super VCDs

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 2/8/03 at 6:21 PM, Thubten Kunga <Kunga at FutureMedia.org> transmitted
the following electronic message:

>What Video Codec and the rest of those settings on the left side of the 
>interface box Dennis? I feel a SVCD coming on. Thanks.
>
>k
>
>On Saturday, February 8, 2003, at 05:53  PM, Dennis R. Cohen wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
Kunga,

I think this is what we covered in iChat yesterday, but from the
timestamp I'm not sure whether this post preceded you finding me there.

Anyway, for those interested, you don't have to mess with the individual
settings within the center of the dialog. Just choose "SVCD (NTSC)" (or
PAL, as appropriate) from the Custom Presets popup menu at the bottom of
the window. That will "fill in all the blanks" for you and have things
set up for a compliant SVCD.

The one caveat I give you for the use of ffmpeg (which I didn't touch
upon on iChat) is that you should not use parentheses or most
punctuation in the names of the source or destination files. ffmpeg
doesn't escape these things well when passing the parameters to the
command-line tools.

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