I am considering buying Pinnacle's Studio DV Plus video capture card to begin DV editing on my computer. I would like to output the finished movie to VCD. I have a Pioneer 525 DVD player. Will VCD's in mpeg2 format play on the Pioneer 525? Does the choice of blank CD have any impact on playback quality and compatibility? Can anyone tell me of their experiences of Pinnacle's DV plus? As a novice, I would welcome any feedback. Thanks for your patience!

-- Colin Etherington (colin.etherington@ntlworld.com), March 07, 2001

Answers

First of all, VCD's are MPEG-1, not MPEG-2....

Super VCD's are MPEG-2, but you cannot just burn an MPEG-2 file to a CD and expect it to run on a DVD player. It must be authored with the right software (I-Author Delux and Nero author SVCD's)

As far as that DV card is concerned, I would recomend not getting that but getting a Dazzle DVC 2 which captures to DVD or SVCD compliant MPEG-2 video/audio in realtime and is great quality. It also does MPEG-1 for VCD's. Converting DV video to VCD compliant video can really only be done through software and is a pain becuase it is a VERY slow process.

Finally for CD-R media, check if the DVD player (or whatever player you want to play VCD's on) supports CD-R media in the first place.

-- Victor DeLarose (not@vailible.com), March 08, 2001.