How to burn 2 VCDs on 1 CD?

[hmpua]

Hi! I have borrowed a VCD movie from the local library recently and I noticed that the almost 2 hrs movie was on 1 CD instead of on 2 usually. Does anyone know how to do that? I have checked the files on the CD. It had MUSIC01.dat and MUSIC02.dat in the MPEGAV folder instead of AVSEQ01.dat and AVSEQ02.dat. Those 2 files are about 448 MB each. Anybody? Thanks!

[Craig Tucker]

If you lower the bitrate and/or resolution enough you can fit many hours on one disc although the quality will suffer, and because you are not using a standard VCD bitrate the disc you make will be XVCD. Use the bitrate calculater on this site to see what the bitrate would need to be to fit your entire movie on one disc, bear in mind that VCD bit rate is 1150kbps, so if you end up with a bitrate of 700kpbs, the quality will be impaired. Whether this reduction in quality is acceptable, well thats up to you.

There are templates for TMPGEnc on this site that claim to allow up to 2 hours of video on an 80 min disc while still maintaining acceptable quality, one that comes to mind is kwags KVCD, you could try giving that a go.

There are also 90 and 99min media available but you need to use software capable of overburning, such as nero, and your burner needs to be able to support overburning. Make sure it does if you go this route because if it does'nt you can trash your burner.

Craig

[vcd2002a]

Here is what I will do. Based on your file size information, the movie length on each VCD disc probably is about 45 minutes. At the begin and end there are usually music sections you may not want. I will use VCDGearGUI to convert the .DAT files to normal .MPG files. Then I will use TMPGenc to cut out the sections I don't want and then merge all the wanted sections together. The goal is control the total minutes to within 80Min. Then burn with Nero. You probably can get 84min on one 80minCDR using Nero but that is not guaranteed.

Try to avoid reencoding. The quality won't be as good as the original.