(S)VCD authoring file formats

[DEmberton]

Does anybody have, or can point me at, some information on the file formats used in SVCD/VCD. I'm not after info on MPEG/MPEG2, but the files used to create menus and subtitles.

Thanks.

Dave

[puertorican138]

VCD stands for 'Video Compact Disc' and basically it is a CD that contains moving pictures and sound. If you're familiar with regular audio/music CDs, then you will know what a VCD looks like. A VCD has the capacity to hold up to 74/80 minutes on 650MB/700MB CDs respectively of full-motion video along with quality stereo sound. VCDs use a compression standard called MPEG to store the video and audio. A VCD can be played on almost all standalone DVD Players and of course on all computers with a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive with the help of a software based decoder / player. It is also possible to use menus and chapters, similiar to DVDs, on a VCD and also simple photo album/slide shows with background audio. The quality of a very good VCD is about the same as a VHS tape based movie but VCD is usually a bit more blurry.

SVCD stands for "Super VideoCD". A SVCD is very similiar to a VCD, it has the capacity to hold about 35-60 minutes on 74/80 min CDs of very good quality full-motion video along with up to 2 stereo audio tracks and also 4 selectable subtitles. A SVCD can be played on many standalone DVD Players and of course on all computers with a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive with the help of a software based decoder / player. It is also possible to use menus and chapters, similiar to DVDs, on a SVCD and also simple photo album/slide shows with background audio. The quality of a SVCD is much better than a VCD, especially much more sharpen picture than a VCD because of the higher resolution. But the quality depends how many minutes you choose to store on a CD, less minutes/CD generally means higher quality.

Hope That Helps!!! 8) :P

[adam]

I'm not sure exactly what kind of info you are looking for. If you download vcdimager and read the documentation that comes with it, it will tell you what each of the files on the (S)VCD does.

Still menu's are stored as mpeg stills. VCDEasy can take any bmp file and convert it to an mpeg still in correct resolution and aspect ratio. Moving menu's are simply regular mpg program stills. These can be stored as either segments or as video tracks. Segments have less of a pause at the start and end, but tracks support entrypoint chapters...use whichever best suits your particular needs.

As for subtitles, there are two formats, SVCD and CVD. SVCD is the official SVCD standard but ironically, the CVD standard seems to be much more universally supported. WinSubMux can create both SVCD and CVD formats and I-Author can create CVD subs. For more info on subtitle formats try reading the documentation for WinSubMux.

[sterno]

SVCD is the official SVCD standard but ironically, the CVD standard seems to be much more universally supported.

Something I read a while back said that a lot of players have firmware bugs that make SVCD-style subs fail when PBC is enabled. I've found that only CVD subs work on my player, so I made a test disc with SVCD-style subs and no PBC, and it worked. Gotta love those firmware bugs.

[DEmberton]

Thanks for the replies.

Basically I'm trying to find out what's possible with the menus, and the format of the files used to control them. Okay, so the menus are actually stored as MPEG files (thanks Adam), but what is it in the other files on the disc that link together the menus?

Ultimately I'd like to be able to write this information from my own software, so I'm not looking for software to do this.

Dave

[Dragonsf]

Maybe you can find more info here:
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Articles/Specific.asp?ArticleHeadline=SuperVCD+Format&...ries=0&index=1

I'm looking for similar info for DVDs.Any help?