VCD Still muxed with Audio vs. Still with seperate Audio???

[marsmayhem]

Which is the correct way to create high resolution VCD Stills with background music:

A) An MPEG Still muxed with MPEG Audio, ie Still+Audio Segment (1 file)

-vs-

B) Two seperate segment items (MPEG Still and MPEG Audio), with the disc authored so that the Still displays, and the MPEG Audio segment is triggered to play immediately after the Still appears.

I'm slightly confused on what the difference is.

TIA...

[JürgenMUC]

Both methods are allowed.
But I recognizes that method B causes more problems on different DVD-players than method A.
An additional advantage of method A is that such files are played on some DVD-players faster what sometimes allow a still image sequence with audio without any interruption.
A third method is to generate one audio mpeg-file with several still images inside. How to create this you will find the necessary information in the following thread (below the discussion of XML-file): https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=151620

Jürgen

[vitualis]

I've never seen any evidence that (A) is "allowed" though it works reasonably well. (B) is definitely allowed but it doesn't work on many DVD players (but then, (A) doesn't work on all either).

The Official VCDHelp.com Demo VCD includes a test that tests (B) - - http://www.vcdhelp.com/vcd

Regards.

[JürgenMUC]

Hello Michael,

in fact I am not 100% sure if (A) is really allowed at VCD 2.0 because I have no access to the white book. But if I look on the mirror of the former official cdi-support side from Philips then I have the feeling that also (A) is allowed (refer http://www.icdia.org/cdprosupport/encoding/pink/mpeg1_specs.htm ).
The Philips VCD2.0 toolkit forsees this option, too (refer http://www.icdia.org/cdprosupport/vcd/vcd2x/vcd_audio.htm ).
The only restriction is that still pictures can not be in a track (no VCDAV) but can be stored within a segment (MPGAV).

Jürgen

[vitualis]

Cool.

Thanks for the info.

Regards.

[marsmayhem]

Hi,

This is from the VCDImager manual:

-------------------------------Quote----------------------------------------------
Segment Items
-------------

Segment items are stored in the so-called SPI area, which consists
of up to 1980 allocation units which are called "segments". Each
segment consists of 150 XA form 2 sectors. Thus the SPI area can
contain up to 658 MB of real-time data(1).

A segment (play) item is a MPEG stream stored in one or more
consecutive segments. A segment item can be
* MPEG video with _optional_ MPEG audio.

* MPEG encoded still pictures with _optional_ MPEG audio.

* MPEG audio only.(2)

-------------------------------Quote----------------------------------------------

Judging from the above, I would say it's supported I just want to know what the difference is, and then how to do it. Do I use TMPGENC and mux an mpeg-audio stream to my existing mpeg-still?

Thanks for the interest so far...

[vitualis]

You could try that but I think that it is fair to say that there is no freeware tool out there that does it.

There were a number of tools that used to mux a number of stills with audio to make a "slideshow" type thing but most of these programs would specifically say that they may not work on all players.

Regards.

[sterno]

I think a while back when I was looking at the multiplexing program included with MJPEGTools it looked like somebody had started working on multiplexing audio with a still (or at least had planned for the possibility), but there wasn't actually much (any?) code written to support it - it just quietly ignored any audio stream if you were muxing a still. It was probably dropped or forgotten because of a combination of lack of interest and lack of information, I think when I looked at the public CVS tree I found those files hadn't been modified in a long time.

[marsmayhem]

I'll check out the Philips VCD Toolkit sometime and see what it provides as far as muxing still and audio. I just want to know the official way of creating menus with background audio (and hopefully that means the most compatible way). I'm not too interested in multiple stills with audio in a single file.

Thanks