S-VCD Refresher course needed

[David Thrasher]

During earlier posts about making Super VCDs, I was a little too tangled up with other pieces of my project to absorb everything that was said about how to go about making S-VCDs. I had printed out a message from Kunga about how to do it but somewhere between his e-mail program and mine extra extranious characters ("=" signs and such) got into the end of lines obscurring some of the links. So I have a few questions to get up to speed:

First of all, does anyone know of any OS 9 solutions? 

I downloaded the pieces he suggested (I'm not on the same computer right now so I may screw up names). One was called "ffmegx.06.f" I believe. The link in the e-mail was garbled enough that I ended up doing a Google search and found it but with a version "g" on the end. Also to download was something called mpegenc (I'm sure I'm really mangling names now!) and a piece called "last binary (with some number on the end of it)" which became a folder after you downloaded it. 

You were supposed to open the disk image DMG file of ffmegx and copy it and drop in the other two items into the same folder. In the folder was an installer for an engine for this program. When you started it a window popped up with buttons to find three pieces - the mpegenc file and two other things that were located in that "last binary" folder. Once you clicked install, the terminal popped up, you entered your password and it installed the right pieces. 

All that seemed to go fine but when I tried to start the ffmegx program it just appeared briefly on the dock and disappeared right away, making me unable to configure it or do anything else with it. What might be the problem. 

I'm also unsure how to use the VCD Builder software (something else he said to download). I tried using an existing MPEG-2 file that I had gotten from elsewhere, used VCD Builder to create an image and used Toast to burn XA-Extended tracks. The CD came up as a PCB VideoCD on my DVD player but when I tried to play it, all I got was a black screen. I obviously have some big holes in my knowlege of how to do all this stuff. Please enlighten me.

Why am I going to all this trouble? Because I can't yet afford a DVD Burner and the software to make Video DVDs. This is kind of a stopgap solution until I can do that. Regular VCDs have too low of quality for me to want to use those. When I am able to afford to buy a DVD Burner (it will have to be external since I have a G3 iMac) what models are you having the greatest success with. I've noticed that the LaCie comes with authoring software. Are there other brands that do too? I doubt I would need anything as elaborate as that very expensive DVD Studio but iDVD requires an internal Superdrive which I can't do. What's the next best thing to iDVD? 

Thanks.

-Dave