I've burnt my first VCD

[CogoSWSDS]

Well I've been hanging around this website for some time now, and finally bought the hardware and have successfully burned my first VideoCD - with menus and chapters even! I thought I'd share my experience with others who might be running into some of the same problems.

I have an older Aspen TruVu Video Phone card that reportedly can capture at 640x480 at 30fps. I installed the card, the drivers, and the software that came with the card and every time I fired up the Video Capture application that came with the card my computer rebooted, rather unceremoniously. I opened up the control panel and went to the Systems applet, then clicked on "Computer" and hit the "Properties" button. I discovered I had interrupt conflicts out the wazoo. So I followed the guide "How to Tune Your System" http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/userguides/81808.php - and set up a hardware profile for Video Capture. So now my system has two hardware profiles - one called "Original Configuration" and one called "Video Capture".

Now my Video Capture application that came with the card would start up and capture at 15fps without dropping frames and with the audio in sync, but when I captured more than 2GB of .avi, none of the apps on my system would open the AVI. Enter VirtualDub. VirtualDub would capture at 15fps, and occasionally drop a frame here and there, but playback was very smooth so I didn't worry about dropped frames. However, the sound was out of sync within about 30 seconds of starting the movie and stayed about half-second out of sync for the duration. Then I remembered that NTSC video is 29.97fps, and that 29.97 is not an integer multiple of 15fps. So I dropped the frame rate to 14.99fps. Audio stayed in sync perfectly with VirtualDub for the entire 13 minute movie, even though VirtualDub still reported dropped frames.

Then I used the handy dandy TMPGEnc wizard to convert the captured AVI to MPEG-1, and used VCDEasy to create the menu, chapters, and Video CD, following the guides on this site on how to do it
( http://www.vcdhelp.com/vcdeasyhowto.htm http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/userguides/104503.php and http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/userguides/84327.php ). All in all, fairly painless, thanks to Freeware programs and the guides on this site.

[ya_jai]

Good Job CogoSWSDS. And good post for the first post.
Keep working on it and share your experiences with other.

[teddymines]

It's good to see a new member posting something useful rather than a generic plea for help. You used the guides and solved your problems. Not only that, but you provided feedback that will probably help someone else.

Thanks for the great post.

[puertorican138]

This forum needs more people like CogoSWSDS.


Keep it up .

[Indigo Girl]

I agree. Wonderful post CogoSWSDS! Glad it worked well for you, and thanks for sharing the info.

[bapski]

wonder how good the vcd was... WAS IT AS GOOD AS there were no BLOCKS, PIXELS, ARTIFACTS and whatever?

if so, i think thatll be a first... BRAVO!