OK ... I'm new to this, would like some input.

I have a Sony TRV330 camera, which is Digital-8. I would like to convert my old 8mm (analog) tapes onto a Video CD.

1) Which extra hardware/software do I need? I do not have firewire card yet.

2) What format does the applicable software store the video in? What format is necessary for the software to write it to CD?

3) Where can I get a list of DVD-players that will be compatible with the Video-CD I create?

4) What is the longest video that I can put on a Video CD?

5) Approximately how large will the files be if I upload, say, 60 minutes of video to my PC?

Any input will be much appreciated.

-- Robbie (tr0ss@yahoo.com), November 07, 2001

Answers

1. You need a firewire card. 2. DV AVI. You need to encode it to VCD Compliant MPEG1. 3. www.vcdhelp.com has a list, and VCD Compliant MPEG1 spec for #2. 4. I've tried 70mins, and it worked. don't know absolute max. 5. for 60mins, expect approx 13GB (compression is fixed at 3.6MB/sec)

-- the_bum (have_no_email@usa.net), November 07, 2001.

The world is at your feet in this, but I suggest you start at the SVCD level with a ADS Pyro firewire card and go from there. The quality is better and it leads more directly to DVD which once bitten now doubt you will want to do. Its a long haul to do all your stuff again when you discover SVCD and interlaced playing of your movies.

A wealth of information is on my web site which may make interesting reading:

http://www.geocities.com/aussie01au/index.html

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@internettv.au), November 07, 2001.

To answer a few of your questions that got missed... www.vcdhelp.com has a DVD Player Compatibility List that lists which DVD players support which format. With VCD, I think all DVD players support it, it's more an issue of "Does my player support burnable media (CD-R/RW) or not?". Getting a DVD player to play a commercial VCD is no problem. Getting it to play one burned to CD-R or CD-RW is sometimes a problem. You can record about 1 minute of VCD video for each one minute of recording time on the CD-R. So you can get 74 minutes on a 74 minute CD-R and 80 minutes on an 80 minutes CD-R and so on. Ross has some good stuff on his web pages and his suggestions are worth considering. I'm not trying to overwhelm you with information, but if you do go the SVCD route, please be aware that SVCD uses resolutions that are not valid for DVD, so simply transfering your SVCDs to DVD format later will not be easy and you will probably be forced to rerecord everything to DVD format. Of course, you could simply make SVCD at valid DVD resolutions. Technically you aren't making SVCDs if you do that, but your DVD player probably won't care if it supports the format at all (those that support SVCD don't do much checking for compliance) and that would give you an easy upgrade path to DVD. SVCD does have better quality than VCD. The trade off is that you sacrifice length of recording to get the better quality. network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438 is a SVCD that might be useful to you, should you go that route. VCD offers better compatibility with existing DVD players though (many don't support SVCD at all), but the quality is not so good.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), November 08, 2001.