Blurry Still in VCD

[jungzimm]

I used VCDEasy to convert some jpegs from my digital camera to MPG stills and burn them to a VCD. The orginal jpegs look fine. The mpg stills look great when viewed in Windows Media Player. The final VCD has extremely blurred images when viewed on the PC using Power DVD. My stand alone DVD is supposed to be able to read CDR and CDRW and VCD2.0 according to the manual and according to the compatibility chart but when I try to play it on the stand alone DVD I get images that are "stair stepped in small blocks on an angle." After downloading the newer version of mpgtools, the created VCD isn't even recognized by the DVD player and shows the blurred (but alligned) images in the Power DVD. Any comments or suggestions would be most welcomed. I am thinking of trying to use Phillips VCD toolking and GEAR to see if the results come out any different but am still struggling to master all the steps involved in using that combination. I would really like to be able to do slide shows on the TV using VCD, espcially since my Samsung S221 DVD player supports them.

Thanks in advance,

John

[jesus2099]

Hello,

yes, if i were you, i would try the philips vcd 2.0 toolkit ..
this is what i do since, mjpegtools do not generate vcd compliant stills.
anyway, philips' software is a bit weird to use but i have 100% perfect results with it (with mjpegtools, my stills don't display on my player)

[jungzimm]

Finally figured out the Phillips Toolkit enough to get 10 pictures turned into a brief slide show. Works fine and dramatic improvement over mpgtools. Now is there any freeware app that can burn the vcd's after my Gear trial period runs out?

[delphi.stuff]

Can you try MPEG Stills made by the Philips toolkit with VCDEasy (i.e do not generates the stills with VCDeasy but use VCDeasy to author the VideoCD) ? What is the result ?

[jesus2099]

Hi there,

I think no problem..
I allways use vcd toolkit and vcdimager .. it, of course, works great.
vcdeasy generates some xml to feed vcdimage .. so in the xml, the still is just a filename.. so no problem I think.

[delphi.stuff]

Yes.

I asked because you talked about GEAR (I do not know exactly what it is...)

[jesus2099]

Oh yes, jungzimm talked about GEAR .. don't know either what's GEAR..

[jungzimm]

Gear is a high end pre-mastering, burning app referred to in the guide for burning stills with the VCDToolKit. I haven't tried using it for anything other than burning the files resulting from the VCDToolkit authoring process. They have a 45 day demo version. When I get a chance, I'll try feeding the stills that the ToolKit creates into VCDeasy and report back. (Sorry have not been on line much but kids got new puppy and we are all short on sleep and trying to get the 'bugs' out of the puppy.)

[jesus2099]

Hi,

As the stills created by vcdtoolkit work with vcdimager.. i think there should be no problem with vcdeasy..
mabye vcdeasy requires you rename the stills from .mms to .mpg ..
however i use vcdimager with my .mms without problem..
don't bother to use something else like gear in my opinion

[jungzimm]

Yes, it all worked fine. Resized them in paintshop, turned them into mpeg's in VCDtoolkit and authored and burned them in VCDeasy. Quality was good. Noticed that for some reason VCDtoolkit wouldn't take them as jpeg's even if resized to 704 x 480. Had to save them as tga's (noticed a slight improvement in quality saving them as tga's vs saving them as bmp's. Thanks to all the the input. It kept me plugging away until I got it right. Now perhaps I can try some fancier stuff with vcdeasy.

John