Authouring VCD using Ulead DVD Workshop.

[DanE]

Hi all,

I've got Ulead DVD WS and have been trying to create a VCD with a navigable menu, and a clip which runs before you get to the menu, like an FBI warning does on a DVD. I also want chapter marks in the file, so that I can skip through it.

I have managed to do all of this in principle, but the MPEG 1 file I'm trying to burn is non-VCD complient.

By that I mean that the only way I was able to make it less than 700 MB was to use one of the KVCD TMPGEnc templates to convert the movie file to a Constant Quality of 65, and I encoded the audio as an MP2 file, at a bitrate of 128K.

When I try and burn the VCD I get to the final screen in Ulead DVD WS, but when I click the Start button, the hard drive fires up and the program says " Converting audio and video stream ".

I believe the program is re-encoding the file to be VCD complient, which will take it over the 700 MB mark. Is there any way to stop the program doing this, and just burn the file as a VCD.

I have sucessfully created VCD's using VCDEasy to create the image and Fireburner to burn the Cue / Bin files, but VCDEasy doesn't allow you to create a menu. Nero allows me to create the menu, but won't put chapter marks in.

Are there any other programs which will allow me to achieve what I'm attempting, or should I just give up !!

Thanks in advance for any comments and help.

Dan.

[solarfox]

Well... first of all, the capacity of a VCD is actually greater than 700Mb, because the White Book standard uses some of the disc capacity normally reserved for error-correction codes as data space instead, so you may not have needed to go to such lengths to encode your movie...

DVD Workshop does have a checkbox setting labeled "Do not convert compliant files" (or something like that; my video editor's down at the moment. Fritzed motherboard. ) that you can select to stop it from reencoding your files. However, it depends on what version you're using -- the "trial" version you can download was, last time I checked, version 1.0 of the program, and the "do not reencode" setting didn't come about until 1.1 . (And no, you can't use the update patch on the trial version.) It also won't work if your file is not compliant with the disc format you've selected; i.e. if the bit rates, frame sizes, or frame rates are wildly outside the format spec.

[DanE]

Yeah tried that but every Ulead product seems to want to re-encode the files to VCD complient format.

I've tried DVD WS and DVD MovieFactory but I get the same results in both program.

Is there a program that will allow me to create the menus from a non-complient file ?