VCD 2.0 & SVCD authoring on a Mac?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Video CD : One Thread

Hi,

Is there an application for authoring and/or burning VCD 2.0 and SVCDs on a Macintosh?

Thanks,

Ashdor

-- Ashdor (ashdot@ashdot.co.il), June 21, 2000

Answers

Perhaps the original asker needs to be WAY MORE SPECIFIC in his question (although it was pretty clear to ME). I seriously doubt he was looking for a yes/no answer -- probably more like WHAT application(s) are available for the Macintosh for VCD2.0 etc.

I'd be interested in finding out a little more about that, too, but not if the answer to my question is going to be... let's call it "brief."

-M

-- Monquis (monquis@discoverymail.com), June 28, 2000.


After extensive research, I have finally found a reasonably cost effective solution to creating VCD 2.0 on my iMac DV SE. You will find older posts about using ASTARTE M.PACK MPEG encoder in conjunction with Adaptec Toast Deluxe to burn the CD. Unfortunately, ASTARTE sold that part of their business to Apple and it is no longer available - I've even checked ebay and a number of software auction sites with no luck. However, I rn across a company - Compact Data - that offers internetdiscwriter. You ca try it out for 5 days free: http://www.internetdisc.com/index.html

Even though the product also burns CDs, it is very limited to the devices it can talk to. I hace a QPS Que!Fire irewire drive that is not supported. After several weeks of pestering them, they finally came through with a solution allows me to create the VCD master image with their software and burn the CD with Toast Deluxe 4.1. This works great and I've layed the VCD on my iMac, Windows 95 & NT 4. I'm looking for a DVD player for my TV to play the VCDs now.

Compact Data claims to have the most complient solution and I can believe it! Their application is actually quite nice - you drag and drop the files and connect the tracts in a graphical UI. It supports a jump page with links to tracks.

Hope this helps. I still have not found anything for SVCD on the Mac yet. Compact Data states that the standard isn't ratified yet so they haven't created a solution.

the iDiscWriter personal is $249 us and Toast 4 is $79 us.

-- Michael Hackney (mljh@yahoo.com), July 18, 2000.


Supposedly, Sonic's DVDIt supports cDVD's that's MPEG2 data on a normal CD-R but only gives 15 minutes of data. Cool for showreels and stuff as it's full DVD quality. (And yes, there is or should by now be a Mac version)

-- Feathers (Feathers@the-establishment.com), February 13, 2001.

As for burning SVCD's on Mac....If you ahve a bin/cue of a svcd what you need to do is install a emulator (softwindwos or virtual pc) and use a program called Binchunker. Binchunker will convert the bin/cue to iso....I will convert the bin/cue into two isos

One iso is gonna be like 2 megs and the other iso like 700 megs (the mpeg)...No go into Toast and go to create multitrack cd (cdrom- xa) and then drag the small 2 meg iso in first and the the mpeg iso second. Burn it, and you ahve a working SVCD burned onto cd. Yes, it will play in a dvd player if the player supports svcd (www.vcdhelper.com for a list of players that support svcds)

If you have a mpg of a svcd, not the bin/cue...It gets a bit tricky if you ahve a mac...if you ahv a pc get nero. For mac, download a program called vcdimager (pc program) and it will convert the mpg to bin/cue....Once you ahve ahte bin/cue you can do what I said above to burn on mac.

-- Tim B. (timb@uclink.berkeley.edu), April 10, 2001.


By the way, I'm interested on SVCD creation. If someone else is interested too, I would like to meet on some chat and discuss some things. I think thats better and faster than a forum... ;-)

-- MarKos (markus2@nettaxi.com), September 02, 2001.


I guess some people don't know what a true SVCD is. That is a mix between a VCD and a DVD, that means you have MPEG-2 video on a CD-R. Less running time but better quality than a usual VCD. And as of now there are NO programs available to the Mac platform that are capable of producing a SVCD. For windows there are (e.g. WinOnCD 5.0).

Hope that helped to get some things straight. the whole bin/cue file converting sound a littel too much like vcd to me.

just my .02 cents

josh

-- Joshua Kadison (powermac@gmx.net), October 30, 2001.


I heard about authoring a VCD 2.0 or SVCD in Nero (Virtual PC), save it as a disk image and then burn this image under Mac OS via Toast. Creating the VCD or SVCD under Virtual PC using Nero is easy, also menus etc. Also saving the Image file works properly. But when trying to burn the image under Toast 5.02, i fail. An error message is shown that Toast could not detect the format of the Image. When conituing although and burning the disc, it donīt work. Maybe somebody has a hint. Concerning Astarte M-Pack 3 i was not able to create an MPEG1 or 2 that could be read by any burning program. Toast is always asking for 1 MPEG file and Astarte M.Pack always creates 2 (one for Video, one for Audio). How do I have to handle this? By the way: I read about some guys having problems with the Toast VCD Export plugin for iMovie. I considered the same and found out that it works perfect when using in iMovie 2.0.1. Under 2.1.1 it does not work.

-- Markus G (markusgspot@gmx.de), December 22, 2001.

Astarte M.Pack 3.5.1e.... you get MPEG video, and audio seprate. You must use the little program called "WiredMux" to combine the audio and video together - called "muxing"

I am not sure if the resulting MPEG's will be workable with the SVCD software or bin/que creation software, I have not tried it. I bet Roxio Toast 5.0.2 would do a good job of burning the CD-XA tracks as the posts above suggest.

Note: when you create SVCD's, the datarate must be less than 2.6 Mbits/s (317 k/s), and it is your choice what the datarate will be. You can fit anywhere from 35 to 80 minutes of video on each CD. You must select the datarate so that you optimize the amount of data per CD - max the CD out so that quality is optimized. Typically you'll use 2 CD's for a movie, and if you've got a really really long movie, you might want to sqeeze it on 3 CD's to improove quality - but I'd probably never do that 'cause 3 is just overdoing it a little... DivX on a computer would be better maybe.

You can usually hold about 807 Megabytes of data on an "80 minute" CD. You may be sceptical of this... but don't be. This is NOT overburning. This is a neat little thing about the format of the CD when you burn it.... you can proove this to yourself by doing some math with 80 minute audio CD's.... 44100 Hz @ 2 channels @ 16 bits = 172 kilobytes/second multiplied by 80x60 seconds = approx 807 Megabytes. BUT.... SVCD's need another little track prior to the MPEG track of about 2 megs, you should maybe size the MPEG-2 video track to be 797 Megabytes and then I believe there is a little bit of space required between tracks, and they add up approximately to 807 MB total I think. So plan your segments datarates so that each segment fills up approx 797 MB. Do this using calculations similar to those shown in the following website: http://www.ualberta.ca/~clp2/eqsn/eqsn.htm#mov

I have set up an Excel spreadsheet specifically for SVCD and VCD data-rate calculations to optimize the ammount of CD used (optimal qaulity) email me at meceman@hotmail.com if you want me to mail this to you.

Sample calculation: 2 CD's of 797 MB total for a 2 hour movie, NTSC (29.97 fps, 480x480) , and 224 kbps audio, results in a total datarate of 226.7 kilobytes/second... this is composed of a video rate of 198.7 k/s (you type this into the encoder usually as a "bit rate" of 1627750 bits/s video only) and an audio rate of 28 k/s. The video "compression ratio" is thus 102-to-1 (assume 24 bit color). This is a little high for MPEG-2... so your picture quality might be a little bit blocky, but probably still good. The datarate will change for all movies, assuming you're optimizing the space used. You must not exceed 317 k/s total I think.

I believe the audio is either MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 ... I would recommend using maybe 224 kbits/s mp2 stereo. Also, for NTSC video, I believe it is 480x480 at 29.97 fps video -- the video is "squished" horrizontally, so that when you create your MPEG make sure you know what the "squish" aspect ratio should be, in a similar way you might scale an image in Adobe Photoshop. The DVD player will probably scale the image up to letterbox format I think. so at 480x480 the image should look skinny.

At the time I write this, I have never in my life ever created a VCD or SVCD!!!! you may be asking yourself, how the hell does this guy know so much for not making these things? the answer is I'm getting a Pentium 4 in about 5 days from now, and I have been doing some research on the web on how to do this stuff : ) and I also have a pretty good background on digital video.

-- coteesh (meceman@hotmail.com), December 28, 2001.


earlier, someone said to use binchunker to convert an mpg to bin/cue files. this require windows, whether it be a "real" machine or a virtual one. you can download something called vcdgear which is a command line utility that will convert between many different formats, including mpg to bin/cue and vice versa. oh yea, did i mention it's free?

www.vcdgear.com for the download

matt

-- matt felsen (matt@iwdt.net), February 03, 2002.


Hi,

is there even a player you can watch SVCDs on a Mac?

Cheers

Miki

-- Miki (reduzierteruhezeit@comeunity.de), February 04, 2002.



Can anybody help with VCD/SVCD creation other than on Virtual PC. Nice and simple click and it works sort of thing.

Please

-- Diddi (pobox1250@yahoo.com.au), February 04, 2002.


People...... QUICKTIME 6. It will be coming out soon and youll be able to watch off a mac.

Burning will follow suit me thinks, since mac will be MPEG2 is complaint.

Hell we could be watching it now we gotta wait for MPEG4 Authoring licenses....

-- Bobbie J (giddie_up@hotmail.com), March 03, 2002.


Hey guys... I hate to admit this, but this is one area where PCs are WAY WAY ahead of Macs on, and I'm definately ashamed.... Ive been able to make SVCDs for the last 6 months with free software on my PC, and I still can't play them on my mac

-- Dusty (djewett@usd.edu), March 18, 2002.

I've found this site helpful in creating sVCDs: http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/

And if you are running OSX, download VideoLAN to view sVCDs: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download.html (the package is at the bottom of the page)

or MacVCD to view VCD 2.0: http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=14082&db=mac

HTH, CD

-- Chubbyduck (chubbyduck@mindspring.com), April 18, 2002.


SVCD creation using OS X exclusively (i.e. tools ported from UNIX source code) are availible!!!! Check out this stuff:

http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/

http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/hagstrom/vcd.html

I remember another site that had probably even better instructions and downloads on mac.com... i forget the user name tho

there also tends to be info posted on BBS's such as... http://www.baseboard.net/base/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=31 http://forums.3ivx.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

however, I still think that tools on the PC are faster and probably more tested, and thus prone to less errors... especially when it comes to converting DivX into SVCD's etc. http://www.vcdhelp.com/burnmpg.htm

-- coteesh (meceman@hotmail.com), April 26, 2002.



OK- there is a way to burn svcds without using virtual pc. You will need Mac OS X. First, go to yahoo.com or google.com and search for VCDtoolsX. Find this program somewhere and download it. It is an OS X Program that does all the vcd/svcd work for you. If you have a .bin file with the mpg2 file in it, choose the first of four buttons. Tell it the bin file and where you want the output file saved. Check the SVCD button at the bottome of the screen if it is an svcd or check the vcd 1.0 or 2.0 if it is those. Click start. When it finishes you will have a mpg file. Now that you have your file, click on the bottom button, the fourth one. Give it your mpg file and save the output file wherever you can find it. Click start. This will make a file that ends with .xml. Next, click the third button, whick makes a disk image of the vcd that can be burned in multitrack XA mode with toast. Give it your xml file. Save the output file wherever you can find it. Click Start. This will take about ten minutes. When it complets, open toast and choose to make a multi track CD Rom XA Cd. Click on select. Drag the three files you got from the last thing you did in VCDtoolsX in order. They should be labeled something like this: videocd1.img, videocd2.img,videocd2.pregap.img. There will also be another file that ends with .toc. Leave it alone! Put these in order...with videocd01 first, and the pregap last. Click burn and it should work in any dvd player that supports SVCDS! For VCD 1.0 and 2.0, do all of this, except for check the type of vcd you want! Hope this works for yall. If you dont have os X, I suggest getting it because this saves a whole lot of time and is the easiest way to go! If you got some questions, email me at weraspamyfamily@aol.com

-- John Thom (weraspamyfamily@aol.com), May 25, 2002.

Okay,

I'm searching the web for encoders that makes MPG, to put my videos os a nice CD-ROM (made with Director). But hell, I can't find any thing! Well, of course I

-- Julio Matos (juliol@osite.com.br), June 03, 2002.


Okay,

I'm searching the web for encoders that makes MPG, to put my videos os a nice CD-ROM (made with Director). But hell, I can't find any thing! Well, of course I'm using a G4, which makes it harder to find. Waiting for a helpfull answer.

Thanks a lot,

Julio

-- Julio Matos (juliol@osite.com.br), June 03, 2002.


I have been looking for a way to create SVCDs on a Mac for a long time, and I finally have a set of apps that allow me to create a SVCD quickly and easily. I decided to write a tutorial of sorts for anyone that wanted to create SVCDs on a Mac running OSX. Check it out at: http://www.geocities.com/mac_svcd/index.html It is a fairly simple process and requires no command-line access. You should, however, have a basic knowledge of Qicktime, but if not, you can email me.

-- Stephen Faucette (faucettte_stephen@hotmail.com), June 15, 2002.

Julio, there are many encoders that make MPEG streams that are available for Macs. Quicktime 6 Preview is out now, and it has MPEG-4 encoding, which is much faster than MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, and produces smaller, higher-quality video. You could fit about an hour and a half of good quality video on one CD-R.

-- Stephen Faucette (faucette_stephen@hotmail.com), June 15, 2002.

hey im in OS 10.2 and just downloaded some movies off IRC, only to find em in .Bin and .Cue. YUCK. up above i found reference to VCDtoolsX

you can find it here

http://www.sbpr.a.se/systemjammers/vcdtoolsx/downloads.html

does the job NICE

jef

-- jefdiesel (jefdiesel@spamthis.com), November 19, 2002.


Look at http://homepage.mac.com/johan/ !!!!!!! Programm for authoring VCD and SVCD (you need S/VCD compatible MPEG-Files)

-- J.F. (27@uni.de), December 15, 2002.

yeah, does anyone know the knew email of meceman???????

-- hector jose (conde_j73@hotmail.com), January 12, 2003.

To play SVCDs on Mac OSX: vlc 0.5.1a OSX video player.dmg http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

To burn SVCDs on Mac OSX: VCDtoolsX OSX.dmg.tgz http://www.sbpr.a.se/systemjammers/vcdtoolsx/ (and you need Roxio Toast 5)

To author SVCDs on Mac OSX: http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/

-- byte rider (nospam@sorry.com), March 12, 2003.


Obviously there is quite a bit of confusion as to what a VCD is and what an SVCD is here. VCD is mpeg 1, very simple, quicktime exports to it, and u can drop it in toast to make a video cd, simplest process ever.

SVCD is MPEG-2, same as on a DVD, if you download an SVCD in .bin format, you are lucky. a .bin file in SVCD format can be dropped into toast 5 under the disc image part and burned directly. a .bin file is a disk image, it;s just that simple. if u want to watch an svcd on your mac, regardless of operating system, just mount that disk image, and locate the mpeg file on it.(or .dat file in case of normal VCD). from there you can play that mpeg file in quicktime so long as you have the MPEG-2 codec which is available for at least quicktime 5 and 6 and is not hard to find.

VCDToolsX, is what u use to do anything else to an SVCD as stated earlier in this post.

Also, the best place for finding SVCD movies is on an application called carracho, check it out, email me and i will let u know about my server.

-- MacManDan - Carracho (iamdan@twcny.rr.com), March 26, 2003.


Does anyone know how i can make an SVCD on a Mac G4 Running OS 9 with the video source coming from the editing software Media 100i

-- james_rydings (james_rydings@hotmail.com), May 17, 2003.

You cant. Only osX

-- asdfsf (asdfkljsd@jkaf.net), June 25, 2003.

pretty much anything you really need to know about converting/burning can be found here

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/

A good program to burn bin/cue/toc/img..would be missing media burner...i think it allows you to convert scvd and vcds as img or bin and cue files as well...so you can pretty much convert and burn in one program...instead of getting emulators using pc software...seems like alot of work...for no reason really..the software is found on the web site above..take a look under tools..and it will list almost all available converter tools..it has a nice forum..and it may have some step by step guides as well.

-- (tragicglassmarionette@yahoo.com), December 26, 2003.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ