Definitive MPEG still

[Varek]

OK, I've seen a couple of threads here discussing MPEG stills but nothing that says that we've found 'The Way'(tm). Could someone please take me through the steps to make TMPGEnc convert a JPG or BMP to a proper MPEG still? I'd like to know for VCD and SVCD. Also, would you use 720x576(480) as the resolution?

Vitualis? That demo disc of yours worked great and had stills in it. Care to tell us how you made them?

[AntnyMD]

I used to use JPEG stills in my Nero projects all the time, but they had no audio.

In VideoPack 4, I add a play item and load up 2 copies of the same JPEG still. Then I select the option for the picture to hold for the duration of my audio track (if you only load one copy of the picture, the audio option I just mention remains greyed out). Then I load a WAV file and press OK. Pressing OK causes the WAV file you load to get compressed into MP2 audio. Do this a number of times and you have a photo album with music. In VideoPack 4 you can do this a number of times in different playlist nodes to create differently themed photo albums. If you find you simply do not have enough pictures to load up an entire 74/80 minute program, drop in some VCD compliant MPEGs and have a little movie play, or some trailers for your favorite movies!

Using the method I just described, you can skip TMPGEnc altogether. Whenever I encoded a BMP to MPEG video or MPEG audio/video, the resulting MPEG picture quality sucked, no matter the bitrate.

Use as high a resolution as possible. VCD and SVCD officially support a maximum resolution for pictures of 704x480/576 (NTSC/PAL). Be warned Nero 5.5.2.3 does something weird to high resolution pictures in SVCD mode. Also sometimes Nero will letterbox your high res pictures in VCD mode. Videopack will do neither of these things.

[Varek]

Thanx for the help.

I'm sure VideoPack 4 is great but I'm trying to do this with TMPGEnc/vcdimager/cdrdao. I began with Nero but have since deleted it to preserve my sanity.

All of the stills I've tried to create with TMPGEnc so far have been rejected by vcdimager as incomplete motion files (I think).

Anyone doing this with the above mentioned tools?

Thanx in advance!

[JimK]

I am also looking for a way to read/edit/make MPEG stills for my VCD's. So far the only way I can do it is to use NERO to make a VCD image with all of the MPEG stills that I want, then I rip the image with vcdxrip and get the MPEG stills out. At this point I can rename them and modify my XML file to put them where I want them.
One thing I would love to do is take the MPEG still menus that NERO creates and edit them to remove the file names. Then I would add titles.

[Braindrain]

I'm assuming you're talking about a VCD slide show. Vitualis made a great tutorial on how to do it. You'll have to search the archives though...