Self-executing VCDs

[billmon]

Hi. I'm a newbie trying to author VCDs using Toast Titanium. What I really want to do is create CDs that will autoexecute on a Windows computer -- i.e. begin playing as soon as the CD is loaded in the CD-ROM drive. The Toast manual doesn't give any instructions for this, and I was wondering if anybody out there knows, a.) whether it is possible to do this in Toast; b.) how to do it; and/or c.) what VCD player would be best to burn onto the disk for a Windows machine. Thanks to all.

[bartman]

Ah.... what you need in an autorun.inf file in the root of your VCD. Toast might let you do this, I'm not sure, but the structure would look something like this

[autorun]
OPEN=blah blah.exe ( put the file you want to run here)
ICON=VCD.ICO ( optional icon file that will show an icon in explorer)

There are two ways to do this. One is to assume that the user has VCD playing software or somethinf that can play VCD files ( like media player). The other is to include a VCD player application on the VCD itself. There are a few simple players out there that can do this with simple stop, pause, ff, rw.

The only thing is that the autorun.inf in the root might make the VCD non compliant, however if you are playing this in a computer I'm sure it won't matter.

[Ross]

I would say create a plain text file named AUTORUN.INF with this text:

[autorun]
open=start mplayer2.exe /play /close \MPEGAV\avseq01.dat

Image you vcd ready mpeg as .img. Drop your .INF then the .img files into Toast CD-ROM XA. If all goes well, Windows MediaPlayer should auto start.
Read Here: http://www.vcdhelp.com/autorun.htm

[billmon]

You're right, I'm only concerned with playing on computer. And I do want to put the player on the CD. The Toast manual doesn't say anything about creating autorun.inf files, and I'm not particularly Windows-literate. Sounds like a call to Toast tech support might be in order. Many thanks for the info.

[billmon]

<<<Image you vcd ready mpeg as .img. Drop your .INF then the .img files into Toast CD-ROM XA. If all goes well, Windows MediaPlayer should auto start. >>>

Ross -- Thanks for the advice, but I the Disk Utility on my Mac only wants to make .dmg disk images. Is that a problem. Does the image HAVE to end with .img?

Thanks again for the help.

[Ross]

This is for OS 10.1.2 or later, I don't have an answer for OS 9.
Use vcdxgen and vcdxbuild functions of MissingMpegTools.
Read the last few steps on the latest process guide w/MMT, on the site.

[billmon]

I gave MMT a whirl, the vcdxgen seemed to work smoothly, created a .xml file OK. But I dont know about vcdxbuild -- it gave me a lot of warnings in Darwin, then created three files: two .img files, one of which purported to be a "pregap" of my original file name, and a .toc file. I have no idea what those last two might be or what they do. I'm going to try toasting the first .img file and see what happens. Thanks for getting me this far.

[Ross]

In the next release of MMT, I will have it delete the toc and pregap tracks.
But for now just discard them as they are not used. ( at least by me )

[billmon]

I burned the first img file onto a CD, using Toast's ISO 9660 CD-ROM XA format. When i threw it on the PC, the autoexec file did its thing, but media player didn't know what to do with the img file.

I thought about using the multitrack XA format, but when I tried that earlier (using a dmg file in my ignorance) and the PC thought it was an audio CD. This is all proving a lot more complicated than I had hoped. :(