fitting video to a cd to play on computer

[nexus123]

I recently bought a card to allow me to output my video from my laptop to the t.v. so my days of burning vcd full length movies onto 1 and one fourth of a cd are over. But I would like to know if there is a program that will let me select the cd size and then encode a file that will fit on just one cd. I can't use divx because divx files seem to skip frames on the dinky little p166 and 80 megs of ram that are in the laptop. Mpeg movies (as in the .dat files that are on the vcd's) seem to play just fine on there. So I assume I'll be converting them to mpeg but not sure how to smash them down to size. Any suggestions?


P.S. Quality doesn't really matter, so I don't care if it spits out `slightly` crappy movies.



Thanks

-=_)Nexus(_=-

[mats.hogberg]

For computer only use, encode to mpeg1 system stream. Set the size to something like VCD resolution, then encode at "VCD like" bit rate. To get more (in time) on to a CD, you have to lower the bit rate (hence quality). You might try to compensate for this by doing a 2 pass VBR encode with the bit rate from the calculation as average bit rate, and max/min bit rate at about 1000 kbps higher/lower than average. Use a bitrate calculator (see the Tools section) to determine what bit rate to use for a specific time.

/Mats

[nexus123]

Thanks I think you hit the nail on the head...