So over the past week or so I’ve been spending way too much time trying to burn a DVD to SVCD (on WinXP). There are a lot of pretty good programs (and documentation) out there, but I thought I’d just let you all know about my experience hoping that it might prove helpful for you. As always, I tried to use free programs to do it.

I started out with Sefy’s Guide from videohelp.com and I somewhat arbitrarily chose to start with the guide for Eazy VCD which you can get at eazyvcd.tk.

I mostly chose defaults, putting my output in a new directory, choosing to keep the temp files, and choosing to stop at the MPEG step. That’s important because the audio/video on the MPEG ended up being out of sync.

I halted the MPEG in mid-rip and deleted that file. Then I ran TMPGEnc (which was installed in the Eazy VCD folder). Again I chose mostly defaults, but I also:

  • Edited the source range in order to correct the audio gap. I used 400 msec for my file but I’d recommend that you test a small segment to find what’s right for you.
  • Clipped the frame using a black mask to get rid of the edge noise.

(Note that the version of TMPGEnc bundled with Eazy VCD can only burn MPEG2 for 30 days. You can find earlier versions without that limitation but I didn’t use them so I’m not sure how well they’ll work.)

Now that I had an MPEG2 suitable for an SVCD, I wanted to burn it. This is where it got tricky (well, okay, I spent a lot of time trying to sync the audio too).

The first time I created a BIN/CUE set, I used VCDWizard. It appears, in retrospect, that the BIN/CUE files that it created were corrupt in some way. I ended up using VCDEasy to both create the BIN/CUE and to burn them, but I grabbed an earlier version (1.1.2) which is still free from here. I also picked up ASPI drivers for WinXP from here.

Here’s what I did in VCDEasy

  • Settings -> (S)VCD Player: Checked Update scan data offsets
  • Settings -> CDRDAO: Forced generic-mmc driver
  • (S)VCD -> Main: Picked appropriate settings and added the MPEG2 file.
  • (S)VCD -> Chapers: Added chapter breaks. They ended up not exactly where I wanted them, but close enough, I guess. (I think forcing the exact chapter breaks may have been what was wrong with my original BIN/CUE files.)

Then I clicked Go. After the BIN/CUE/XML set was created, I went to Tools -> CDRDAO Tools, loaded the CUE and clicked Burn (don’t forget to put a blank CD in first).

And that’s it! My SVCD seems to play quite well on my computer’s DVD player. It doesn’t play quite correctly on my actual DVD player, but I suspect that might be because my player is so old. I’d like to test it out on a newer player one of these days.

Virtual CD
Oh, and for those of you who were only interested in the Virtual CD segment, while I was looking around for VCDs and burning, I ran across a link to a neat little program (unofficially) from Microsoft. It allows you to mount ISOs as virtual drives. Useful for checking if an ISO is good, and potentially useful for playing computer games that require the disc to be in the drive (haven’t tested that yet). You can get that here.