iMovie to SVCD? Any easier way?

[MDS]

I've been pouring over this forum for weeks now trying to learn how to do what I thought would be an easy task. I want to burn video from iMovie to a CD to play on a stand alone DVD player with better than 240 lines of resolution.

I've got a 600 mhz iMac, 512 meg of ram, the latest Toast Titanium and QT6 pro. I've got the basic VCD burn down fine and they play on my Apex 1200, but I'd like to see more of the 520 lines that my sony cam puts out.

I used to be a decent programmer in my day, but my day was the day of Fortran and Z-80 machine code. I'm looking for the path of least resistance.

This is what I THINK I know.

SVCD uses mpeg 2 and that means a high priced liscenced codec like Cleaner or DVDSP. I don't have m.pack or dev tools either.

ffmpeg claims to get a great 480 by 480 video with mpeg 1 in a svcd format. I thought QT6 pro would export mpeg 1 or DivX (aka mpeg-4?) that I could run through ffmpeg but I'm lost.

I'd be thrilled to get just 10 min of high res video on a cd-r(w) with no menus, no nothing fancy.

Any ideas?

[squeed]

There isn't an easy way. But there is a way.

http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/

-S

[MDS]

I've been down that path and had no luck. I was hoping if I could bypass mpeg 2 withh ffmpeg life would be easier, even if I ended up with a xsvcd instead of a svcd.

Dumb question - will DVDSP produce svcd's?

[Ross]

DVDSP will NOT make compliant SVCD mpegs.

If you need help with getting the tools, or making them work with the process to make svcd compliant disk, email me.

RNC

[leoxyz]

I make svcd from imovie: it's quite simple, but I think you need dev tools installed (a free but big download).
I export from imovie with the idvd settings, check the high quality flag in qtpro, then use MMT, itunes for the audio and mediapipe for the mpeg2 encoding (you can also use ffmpegx, but I wasn't able to configure mpeg2enc).
But I see that RNC offered his help.
He is the Joe Montana of mac svcd, you are in good hands and are probably already burning svcd's.