VCD Creator Reservation Conflict

[joel25]

I'm trying to burn a VCD on a CD-RW disc (my DVD player won't recognize a CD-R disc).

When using the Easy CD Creator applet VCD Creator I get this message:

WARNING: Reservation conflict. This drive cannot be used because it is already being used by "Roxio DirectCD Kernal".

I'm using Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5.01 on a Windows 2000 Pro machine.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get this to work?

Thank you,
Joel

[patrickm]

yes. uninstall DirectCD (or preferably, never install it in the first place). i think you can also disable it by right clicking on its icon in the taskbar or in some other method, but it's been a long time since i even had it installed.

also, use a blank/freshly erased disc to write to. no "formatted" cd-rw's, and no discs with active sessions on them.

[joel25]

Do you use CD-RW's at all? If you do, what do you use to enable you to use them? I use them to back up data files all the time that's why I have DirectCD installed.

I was hoping that I could re-use my CD-RW's to burn a VCD to watch that I have archived on CD-R's so that it will work in my DVD Player during the times that I'd want to watch it on my television rather than on my computer monitor. Otherwise, I'd just archive and play the same CD-R's if my DVD player would play them.

Thank,
Joel

[patrickm]

i use cd-rw almost exclusively, except for audio cds and final-product SVCD/VCD (i just recently upgraded to a SVCD capable player and also just got the VCD toolkit, so i do lots of testing to see what looks best on it, and i hate wasting a cd-r on a 5 minute test clip or on a disc that ends up having a mistake on it like the wrong pixel aspect ratio or just flat out doesn't work)

i just use normal disc authoring software to write data cds. you only need directCD to use it like a drive and do packet-writing, which i personally find to be a waste of time. it just doesn't have the transfer rates to work like another hard drive. and when i back things up, adding a 300Mb session at 8x takes about 10 minutes, or about 17 at 4x. once you start easy cd creator, it's just a matter of 'import previous sessions', drag & drop, 'close session leave disc open', and burn.

for short test VCDs it's a 5 minute burn, pop it in the dvd player, see what it does, then bring it back and erase it for 60 seconds and go at it again.


the other advantage to that is that you can use the ISO filesystem in DOS without loading up a DOS UDF reader.

[joel25]

Hi Patrick,

You obviously are more experienced with this than I am. I haven't found a way to disable DirectCD on Win2k like I could on other O/S's. Maybe the only way is to uninstall it.

Once you've burned to a CD-RW, how are you able to reuse it? Is there a way to delete a partition or whatever is on there to begin again? You mentioned "erasing" a disc. How is that done on a CD-RW?

I'm using the ATI AIW card to capture video and would love to get it in a format that is compatible with SVCD. How would you recommend that I do this to get the best quality on a SVCD CD-RW?

Thanks,
Joel

[patrickm]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
You obviously are more experienced with this than I am. I haven't found a way to disable DirectCD on Win2k like I could on other O/S's. Maybe the only way is to uninstall it.

Once you've burned to a CD-RW, how are you able to reuse it? Is there a way to delete a partition or whatever is on there to begin again? You mentioned "erasing" a disc. How is that done on a CD-RW?
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

actually, i just got win2k thursday, so i'm not sure about how to disable it, but uninstalling it is an option. but after you uninstall it, see if it can read the directCD discs you already made. i think it has a UDF reader installed that might work. it won't write to them like directCD, but it should read them. if it doesn't, you might want to consider reinstalling directCD, then copying what's on those discs (maybe just drag them to a data cd layout and do "burn image" if you have lots of hard drive space to hold disc images) so you can keep that data, then just uninstall directCD again and use RW's normally.

to erase a cd-rw, just open easyCD creator. on one of the dropdown menus there's an option named "erase disc". just follow the instructions. you'll probably want 'quick erase'. then it's essentially blank again. just author to it like any other data, audio, or video cd.

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
I'm using the ATI AIW card to capture video and would love to get it in a format that is compatible with SVCD. How would you recommend that I do this to get the best quality on a SVCD CD-RW?
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

search the forums, we've written about this plenty of times (sorry, but it's late). basically, in MPEG, keep motion estimation as high as you can. the best quality is really gotten from AVI capture and offline (post-capture) encoding. realtime always looks worse given the same bitrate.