Two Burning Questions...

[Duminas]

1) When burning a VCD (with MPEG2 files using the VCD header trick, not sure if that matters), do the files get burned by filesize or time? The reason I'm asking is, I've got 3 MPEGs of 250 MB each... but they're only 23-24 minutes in length.. I'm really hoping I can fit all three on a VCD (this is a 74 minute CD-RW.)

2) "Overburn"... how much does that let me burn past the limit of the CD itself?

Thanks for any help!

[Tommyknocker]

I hate to tell another man this, but size is what matters. That is why you can put several hours of video on a 80 minute rated CD buy lowering the bitrate or decreasing resoluton. You make more efficient use of available disk by sacrifing quality and size of your display.

In short, if quality is not a big issue, try using the bitrate calculator, along with TMPGEnc's wizard and see how many of your videos you will be able to fit on one CD. This guide may help, even though it was written for VCds, a lot of the info you can convert to SVCDs.

[ZippyP.]

Get an 80 min. CD and it will work, it will hold 800 MB in VCD mode without overburning.

[Duminas]

My player doesn't like 80 min CDs and has trouble playing them :\

And argh, the videos can only be about 215 MB each then...
Do you think it's worth keeping MPEG2 at around 1170-1200kbps VBR to have the better quality than VCD, or just go down to them? Also... is there a huge difference between 224kbps and 192kbps audio quality?

Thanks again!

[Tommyknocker]

You are the ony one that can make that determination. Encode a small part of the video and see if it answers all your questions for you.