Making a VCD from BMP's & JPEG's

[Tomalan55]

I'm going crazy trying to make a photo album from a bunch of pictures and be able to play on my TV. I have all kinds of programs and my brain is turning into sludge. I have Easy Creator 5, Nero 5.5, MGI Videowave 4, Photosuite 4,TMPGEnc, and a HP 9701 burner. Maybe I am trying to hard but I would like nice clean sharp pictures that I can view on my TV throught my DVD or my Video CD player. Help please. Tom

[markm]

Take a look at WinOnCD 3.8. I'm pretty impressed with it's photo album ability. Unlike some of the others, it doesn't encode stills into an mpg. What I really liked about it, is that it creates a disk that will work on BOTH a DVD player, and a PC.

It makes 2 copies of all the images, one in the original format, and one for the DVD player. When put into a PC, a web browser opens allowing you to navigate and view the images nicely. In the DVD player, you have full navigation with remote, and background music.

I've been trying to sort out a good way to distrubute family photo albums to both PC and non-PC family members, and this is just what I was looking for.

Unfortunately Roxio doesn't sell 3.8 in the US, but a German version will install with English.

[Otomone]

Well, you certainly don't need to buy any more software, you just have to use the stuff you have effectively. Here's one way using the stuff you have if your pictures (like mine) are all different sizes and shapes:
1. Using your Photosuite tools, create a nice background at 704x480 resolution (for NTSC)
2. Paste your pictures onto the background so you have a whole bunch of pictures at 704x480 resolution.
(Of course you can just crop or resize or whatever, but 704x480 resolution is a good starting point)
3. Now startup Videowave. Add all your pics to the library. Then put them into the storyboard. Use the editting facility to set the time you want each one on screen. Make some fancy transitions, too. Add some music if you like.
4. Produce the movie using whatever codec you want. You might even save it using the Video CD template, but I don't know what kind of encoding quality you will get.
5. If you saved it as an avi, encode it with TMPGenc.
6. Take your vcd compliant .mpg file and burn it with Nero to vcd.

I've done this sort of thing a few times with Videowave II or III and been pleased with the results.
Of course, there's plenty of other possible ways.

[bertmartin]

Just us your MGI Videowave 4. I import BMPs into videowave library and drag them to the storyline. Then add any transistions and make a AVI. Use any encoder and burn. The default time for pictures is 5 seconds but you can change. I did notice that if the aspect ratio is not standard then videowave might distort.