M-JPEG Digicam movies to VCD - how? (Longish post)

[fishyweb]

My digital camera (a Fuji S602) captures short movie clips in M-JPEG .avi format. I want to burn these to VCD, to play in my DVD player.

I normally use WinOnCD 3.8 to do my CD burning, and the WinOnCD manual states that it is capable of creating a VCD from .avi files. However, when I initially tried to do this, the image was not visible on playing the VCD. Also, when previewing the movie in WinOnCD, I got the message "Cannot find vids:mjpg decompressor".

I did some investigation, and concluded that I needed a M-JPEG codec, and found one at Morgan Multimedia. I downloaded an evaluation copy of this, and this showed promising results - I was able to preview the movie in WinOnCD and everything looked (and sounded) fine.

However, having burnt the VCD, I found that the image was fine (yippee) but the audio had a constant very loud buzz (more like a constant stream of loud clicks, actually) which was not apparent in the raw AVI file played in Quicktime. This audio anomaly is evident when playing the VCD back on my PC or DVD player.

Questions:
What might be causing this audio problem?
Is there a specific setting in the codec that I need to adjust?
Is there a different codec I should use?
I have a copy of Nero available (V5 I think) - might this give better results?
Is there a different approach I should try?

Thanks in advance
Steve

[bugster]

First off I would suggest you start doing some reading here:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/convert
There is lots of info on converting video from one format to another.

As for your audio problem, it could be caused by the audio codec used by WInOnCD or by sample rate conversion. Again, look into the guides to find out how to do sample rate conversion of your audio using tools such as virtualdub or Goldwave.

One Tip. You will get much better quality VCD's using an external encoder such as TmpGenc (assuming good quality source).

[fishyweb]

Your suggestions were spot on, bugster. Thanks. I used TMPGenc to convert the .avi to VCD format before burning the VCD. The video and audio were all spot on, thanks. I now just need to decide which MJPEG codec to continue to use (the subject of another post...).

Thanks again.