burning mvcd with Nero 8 Essentials or ???

[Jim S.]

I have the OEM edition of Nero 8 Essentials. My problem is that I have an 800MB MVCD-encoded MPEG file which I'd like to burn to CD, but Nero wants to re-code it to be VCD-compliant, which makes it too big to fit the disk by quite a bit. Everything I've read about MVCDs says "just burn it as a non-compliant VCD", but I can't find any option in this version of Nero to do that. Is that option not present in the OEM version, or is the interface just so overly user-friendly that I haven't found the power user options yet?

If I can't do it with this version of Nero, what FREE software would you recommend for the job?

[edDV]

You can copy the file to a DVD. "Essentials" is just an advertisement for the full Nero 8 and doesn't do much.

[redwudz]

And I doubt you find any 'Power User' settings in Nero, Essentials or even the full version. It's pretty much a bloated no-brainer program that tries to do everything, but does none of it very well. JMO. It wants to re-encode as a VCD because a MVCD is a non-standard format.

If you really want to burn a 'out of spec' vcd, try ImgBurn. It won't try to re-encode, but still, you may have problems playing back the disc on a set top player.

A MVCD (Mole VCD) is one version of a non-standard VCD format. KVCD is better known.

You can compress a file as much as you like, but the quality will suffer and the format may not be compatible with most players. There's no 'magic tricks' to make a better VCD in a smaller space.

You would be better off to use Xvid or Divx and a Divx compatible player if you want smaller filesizes and the possibility to play back on a Divx player..

If you really need or want to use a CD for video, I would use two CDs at least for most any movie, but even then, tha quality will be poor compared to a DVD.

[Midzuki]

http://download.videohelp.com/vitualis/index.htm

VCDImager is able to wrap "any" MPEG-video in a VCD~file-structure,
regardless of bitrates, framesizes or quantize matrices.
Does require some learning effort though.