Which tool combines still picture, video, and audio VCD?

[kentschu]

Here's my situation:
Like many people, I have a digital camera (Canon S300) that takes both still pictures and short AVI movies. I want to be able to send a disc (probably VCD) to my friends and family with a photo album (of sorts) on it. I have used products like VideoImpression to create MPEGs and then burned them on CD with Easy CD Creator. However, the quality of that solution is poor. I'd like to achieve the same type of results (in terms of background music, menus, etc.) but also be able to have higher quality still pictures and (hopefully) store the original files on disc.

I have downloaded and tried to use VCDEasy as well as ULead's PictureShow.

Here are my problems/questions:

1) JPEG discs - can these have any background music or menus? is this a newer standard, i.e. most older DVD players won't support it?

2) VCDEasy - Is there a way to incorporate background music that will play while watching the stills? Can I place MPEG movies (that were converted from the AVIs) in with the stills? Does this program give the ability to convert AVIs to MPEGs (if not, is there a program that will batch convert AVIs to MPEGs)?

3) PictureShow - Is there a way to incorporate MPEG movies in with the stills? Is there a way to store the original JPEGs on the disc? This program does a great job with background music and menus, but I can't seem to figure out the two questions above.

4) Can someone explain the file limitations in terms of capacity? I thought it was 99 files max per folder with 99 folders max. But then I see 1900 files listed for PictureShow and I'm confused. Also, is there a file capacity limitation on JPEG Photo CDs?

With the large number of digital cameras out there these days, isn't anyone making one software program that can create photo albums in VCD formats using stills, videos, and background audio? It seems like I shouldn't be the only person trying to combine these features on one VCD...

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kent

[kjmacke]

This is a program that turns your stills with background music into an avi. Then you encode it to vcd with tmpgnc.
http://www.joern-thiemann.de/tools

[kentschu]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but that doesn't help me at all.
I don't want to convert the stills to video, otherwise the quality of the photos will be reduced dramatically. I've already created VCDs using this method and the pictures are quite fuzzy.
I want to use MPEG stills with occassional video clips and background music - not one big MPEG video stream.
Thanks, though...

Kent

[hp_lovecraft]

You could try Windows Movie Maker beta2. (its free)

It stores the pictures as MPEG-video, but the quality is great. I made a test with MPEG-stills, and MPEG-video and I couldnt tell the difference.
Plus, WMM can add music, effects, text, mixed with video clips.

It creates an uncompressed AVI at 720x480. I'll convert to MPEG with TMPEG as MPEG2, 720x480, at 6MBPS, and I don't see any artifacts. Its probobly the best solution unless compliance is a big issue.

For menus, NERO is pretty easy, but you can make great menus with VCDimager.

nick

[vitualis]

1) JPEG discs - can these have any background music or menus? is this a newer standard, i.e. most older DVD players won't support it?

JPEG discs (aka PictureCD by Kodak) -- there will be no background music or menus on a stand-alone player. Most DVD players don't support this in any case.

2) VCDEasy - Is there a way to incorporate background music that will play while watching the stills? Can I place MPEG movies (that were converted from the AVIs) in with the stills? Does this program give the ability to convert AVIs to MPEGs (if not, is there a program that will batch convert AVIs to MPEGs)?

You can put audio while ONE still is displayed (though this isn't well supported): http://www.geocities.com/mikk999/StillsWithAudio.htm

You cannot make audio play with multiple still images -- unless you encode the whole thing to MPEG video (but then you lose the high resolution of the stills).

You can make a VCD with stills and mpeg video clips yes.
http://www.vcdimager.org/guides

VCDEasy is not an MPEG encoder. TMPGEnc however, is a great free/shareware encoder.

4) Can someone explain the file limitations in terms of capacity? I thought it was 99 files max per folder with 99 folders max. But then I see 1900 files listed for PictureShow and I'm confused. Also, is there a file capacity limitation on JPEG Photo CDs?

You can have up to 1980 MPEG still images on a VCD. The "99" thing is definitely wrong.

For JPEG CD-ROMs (not Photo-CDs, they are something else -- I'm only mentioning this because these terms get confused now and then and whole thread(s) pop-up around this confusion), the capacity limitation is the size of the CD as a CD-ROM (i.e., 650MB or 700MB).

With the large number of digital cameras out there these days, isn't anyone making one software program that can create photo albums in VCD formats using stills, videos, and background audio? It seems like I shouldn't be the only person trying to combine these features on one VCD...

Um, you can do the above with a number of programs. I suggest VCDEasy. Ulead PhotoShow (or something like that) is good as well.

You cannot put background audio on a number of still images on a VCD without encoding it as a video clip.

Regards.