S-VCD Refresher course needed

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 6/5/03 at 2:30 PM, David Thrasher <idave at earthlink.net> transmitted
the following electronic message:

>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'm not aware of a good OS 9 solution. Though I haven't tried it, and
thus can't recommend it, Discrete's Cleaner software (OS 9 version) with
MPEG Charger, should be able to do the job; however, that solution is
more expensive than purchasing a SuperDrive, so....

>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.
>

The current version of ffmpegX is 1.0.7 and it has gone from being
freeware to being $15 shareware. You can find it at Version Tracker.
There is a utility that comes with it that tells you want else you need
to download and, once you've done that and pointed the utility at the
results, it will install the pieces in the proper places (mencoder,
mpeg2enc, and mplayer).

Once ffmpegX is installed (requires 10.2 or later), feed it your input
DV file (or DivX or...), give the output file a name, and choose SVCD
(NTSC) from the Presets popup. That will set all the parameters on all
the tabs for you. Click the button and let ffmpegX do its things. It
will launch Terminal and send a sequence of commands to do all the
processing. When it signals completion, you can drop the mpeg-2 file
into a VCD Builder window to create a new sequence and, after setting a
disk name and so forth, click Burn. It will create the CD-ROM XA image
files for you, launch Toast 5 Titanium, hand the images off to Toast and
await you inserting a blank CD-R and clicking Record.

Johan Lindström, author of VCD Builder, has some pretty good
documentation on using it on his Web site. There's also a decent ffmpegX
user guide available at
<http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=126672>.

I covered the VCD Builder part of this in my iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and
iDVD Bible and have expanded/updated the coverage in the iLife Bible
(currently being bound and due out the end of next week).

--Dennis Cohen
  iLife Bible
  iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, & iDVD Bible
  MacOS X Bible
  (etc.)