is my computer fast enough to burn VCDs??

[robertjuric]

Just wondering before I go out and buy a CDR. I have an old 300mhz, 64mb comp. It does fine for everything Ive ever done on it. If I just leave it alone and let it burn undisturbed would I be ok?

[twodogs]

it will be fine.

Nearly all burners have some type of "burn-proof" or "buffer underun protection" meaning that if your burner is trying to burn faster than the PC can serve up data, it will not make a coaster.

[robertjuric]

sweet. I will soon be a VCD burning machine!! lol.

What about authoring VCDs? like putting different clips together to make a nice menu system, should it handle that??

Also whats a good prog. to turn still images into .mpgs so I can burn them.

[ktnwin]

I have done lot of VCDs with a Pentium 2, 266 Mhz + 64MB RAM !!!
Its' just slow but I made it.

[twodogs]

for images to mpeg, use VCDEasy to convert images to "mpeg stills"
There's a guide for this at vcdeasy.org

Note these are "mpeg stills" which is different that an mpeg movie, but both are compliant for VCD.

[robertjuric]

oh ok ya, thats what I meant still images to be put in as like a menu background and stuff.

thanx for all the help.

[poopyhead]

just try not to do stuff on the comp while you're burning...

[Harryford]

the way the prices are you might want to upgrade. you can get a 2200+ complete machine for 399.99$ at tigerdirect.com and seeing as you already have a monitor you should be fine.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I'll go one better for <$100USD you can get a Celeron or Duron 1ghz mobo/CPU combo and 256MB of RAM,believe me the speed in encoding is worth the money.
www.pricewatch.com

[next]

You may have to slow down your burns if the burn proof technology proves less that efficient. By that I mean if you install a super duper 48x burner you may not be able to take full advantage of the burning speed of the drive.

Worst case is that you may have to experiment to find the right burning speed that doesn't fail half way through the burn and create a coaster. Much of this will be dependent on your PC and its CPU power. If you have patience you will be fine. By that I mean you can slow down your burn speed to 8x for example. It may take longer but it should work just fine.

[Harryford]

I have had both celerons and durons, trust me you dont want them. amd athlon cps are the same price for a lot better system.

[vitualis]

I first began making VCDs on my Pentium Classic 200MHz with a 2x Smart-and-Friendly burner. They still work fine...

As long as you PC supports all your programs and the burner actually works, you can make VCDs.

Regards.

[Vejita-sama]

Burning will not be a problem, but encoding VCDs will be. A huge problem in fact. If all you are doing is stills it'll just take a long a&& time. But for motion MPEGs (esp MPEG2) except ~20x the source runtime.

That is ~40hrs to encode a 2hr movie. No MMX/SSE either so that's a guess.