I've just started exploring ways of creating CD-R video playable on a DVD. To begin with, I purchased a Konka 1800U. It was only about $175 (includes shipping) from http://www.800.com if you get the $25 off for new customer coupon (look around for coupon web sites). The Konka is supposed to be VCD as well as S-VCD compliant.. a review cited C-Cube components, so it should be able to handle lots of variations.

I downloaded demo versions of Ligos LSX-Encoder 3.0, Vitec MPEG2 Toolkit, and Nero 4.0. Nero works great in creating a VideoCD. It complains when you violate VCD2.0 standards, but it still allows you to burn it. Vitec's demo didn't allow VideoCD compliance box to be checked, and the output MPEG streams couldn't pass into Nero. The Ligos encoder, though, worked well.

Using the VideoCD checkbox, you can either do constant bit rate (CBR) or variable (VBR). If you choose VBR, you can then have a lot more flexibility in specifying the bitrate. I was able to push the video to 2000 bps max, with average rate between 1600-1800, and it played fine on my Konka DVD. This test was on the short dolphin and balloon clips provided on the Ligos site. Amazingly, I was able to burn several test clips onto a CD-RW and get it to play on the Konka (no CD-R necessary). It worked using both 2x and 1x CD-RW burn using a HP CD-Writer Plus (SCSI).

I would really like to try out SVCD creation, but it looks like both formatting solutions are too expensive ($500+)... given that price, it doesn't pay to do SVCD, but rather just get Sonic's DVDIt! SE. Does anyone know if you can play any clip (MPEG1, MPEG2, etc) within the DVD framework?

-- Bill Katz (WTKatz@yahoo.com), February 26, 2000