Can now play mp3s on dvd player that does not support it!

[jtq4u]

Having spent all of Saturday devoted to research and experimentation I have
finally found a way to store MP3 files on a CDR in a format that can be read by our home dvd player, which has no explicit support for mp3s.
The result is a disk you put into the dvd player which shows a menu
listing all the songs and track numbers, from which you can choose a track
and it will play it (then continuing to play the tracks in numeric order).
You can press 'menu' to return to the listing.
The way I have done this is by creating a substandard vcd with a very
specific combination of bit rates and tweaks. I couldn't find anywhere on
the web detailing how to do this, and so had to do many hours of trial and
error.
I thought perhaps other people might also want to do this so here is a sumary of the required data rates:

an mpeg movie file with:
0 kbit video channel
200kbit system data rate
128kbit audio with 8 channels of joint stereo.

these values must be exact (there is a hidden requirement for 72k of system
data). You must have a 0Kbit video channel defined for the dvd player to be
able to handle it.

the process:

Once I had got the bit rates for system data and audio data correct (as
mentioned in my first message), and twigged to the fact i needed a 0k video
stream it wasn't too difficult. Only one very annoying discovery in xing
(the software i use to create mpeg files).. that if you create a system
(rather than just audio or just video) mpeg using only an audio source
specified (leaving the video field blank) you can't use wild cards. It does
some sort of check to see if x.* appears in the feilds and notices its
missing. You have to explicitly create a job for every track. Our solution
is that we are going to create a set of standard jobs named 01.mp3->01.mpg
through to 99.mp3->00.mpg then we will bulk rename our tracks to these
names each time, perform the work to be done, and bulk rename them back.
Some C code will be written to do the renaming and create a lookup table for
the reverse process.
Once your mpg files are created you can use Nero's create VCD (not
SVCD) function to create a vcd. dragging all the files onto the disk layout
with their origional file names allows you to get a menu for free (>=version
5) if you tick the correct box in the properties. You need to turn off the
'create compliant disk' option as obviously my bit rates are non complient.
As i say i am not sure my hack will work on all players but i would be
interested to hear of anyone elses experiances with it!

[ronnylov]

But isn't the audio in VCD mpeg1 layer2 (mp2). How can it work then with mp3 files? Do you transcode them to mp2? Won't you loose quality then?