Best VCD Encoder for Mac

[BarnierB]

Hello everyone,

I did a search first, but didn't find much on the topic... So, I hope I didn't miss anything. I'm looking for a good VCD encoder for my MacBook. Toast7 is barely legible... I've found iVCD and ffmpegx. Are there any I missed? What do you suggest? Thanks!

[tomlee59]

I haven't found a truly good one on the Mac, unfortunately. I've tried to use ffmpegx, but it's too frustrating. It has very serious sync problems on many sources (particularly when encoding from dvd), as well as numerous annoying nuisances such as reporting improper duration (if it says the source is 91 minutes long, don't believe it), choosing wrong aspect ratios/framerates, and not always "keeping elementary streams" even when that option is explicitly checked.

This is not to say that it never works well (sometimes it works great, in fact), but I've never been able to figure out ahead of time when it's going to have trouble, so I've wasted a lot of time doing failed encodes.

I now use the older (free) version of EazyVCD on the PC (yes, blasphemy, I know) to make (X)VCDs. I've never had any sync, framerate or aspect ratio problems with it, and it is extremely fast (not an apples-to-apples test, I know). You can also choose from among several speed/quality settings. It just works, which ffmpegx does not do with any consistency. The only deficiency of EazyVCD is the lack of subtitle support. In those cases, ffmpegx is the low-cost tool of choice.

The most reliable mac-based flow for making vcds is first to use a different tool to encode into high bitrate (say, 1.5-2Mb/s) divx/xvid. This takes care of the sync issues. Then use ffmpegx to encode into vcd/xvcd/kvcd/svcd. When starting from divx, ffmpegx tends not to exhibit the problems it has when starting from, say, dvd source material. The only drawback of this flow is slow speed because of the need to generate the intermediate divx file. But it lets you insert subtitles at the last step of the conversion, so if that capability is important to you, that's the most reliable VCD creation method I know of on the mac (using free or very inexpensive tools).

[pixel zombie]

mpeg2works is another good option...

[dnix71]

MMT-EZ (freeware) will make many different types of vcds.

The download/info page is here:

http://www.angelfire.com/mac/rnc/

[AntnyMD]

I haven't found a truly good one on the Mac, unfortunately.

I agree with this sentiment as well. Since I run a Mac mini (Intel) at home, I grabbed an unused copy of Windows XP Pro from work, and installed the last freeware version of TMPGEnc.

VCD resolution and bitrate is perfectly fine for watching movies on a computer, so I use TMPGEnc to encode hours and hours of content to burn onto a dual layer DVD, and then play back in Apple DVD Player.

[tomlee59]

TMPGEnc is a terrific tool; I wish that a version of it were available on the mac. EazyVCD uses TMPGEnc under the hood to do the heavy lifting, and the results are quite good. Being able to put more than 10 hours of videos on a single 4GB flash drive is a great thing for long trips. It's amazing how long a laptop battery will run things when it doesn't have to power up anything that spins.