[elucid]

hello all,

i searched and attempted every possible method i know of,

1) how can i import the .dat file from a toast burnt vcd back to mpeg?

2) i have downloaded a bbc television special of the smiths from 1983. it is rare, and whomever encoded it used the most obscure of avi codecs. i can watch it on mplayer only, but i wish to put it on dvd. i have tried aviray, convert to qt, final cut pro 4, cleaner 6 and many other programs utilizing the qt engine. i have even used a handful of programs on pc. i have latest divx codec installed, still qt is missing a component required for proper playback. what am i missing?

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally posted by elucid:
1) how can i import the .dat file from a toast burnt vcd back to mpeg?

since it's not encrypted, you can copy it to the finder. Since dat/mpg seems to be the only format for which QuickTime is the least bit flexible, you can usually just rename it to mpg. If that doesn't work, use VCDGear

2) i have downloaded a bbc television special of the smiths from 1983. it is rare, and whomever encoded it used the most obscure of avi codecs. i can watch it on mplayer only, but i wish to put it on dvd. i have tried aviray, convert to qt, final cut pro 4, cleaner 6 and many other programs utilizing the qt engine. i have even used a handful of programs on pc. i have latest divx codec installed, still qt is missing a component required for proper playback. what am i missing?

you have to find out what the codec actually is, instead of just trying random programs (the first two you mentioned will only work with divx/mp3 files, and the second two are not intended to use avi source files at all; any avi compatibility is purely coincidental). You can find the FourCC (often the only way to track down the codec) with DivX Tool or by opening the file in HexEdit and looking (examples here). Alternatively you can use MPlayer/MEncoder to convert the file to something more standard. Read the docs for that

[elucid]

thanx for answering unkle,

1) when trying to veiw or copy dat file i get :

The operation cannot be completed because some data cannot be read or written.

(error code -36)

vcdgear just hangs for hours with dat2mpeg and output file remains at 0 mb


2) it is avi file(verified w/hexedit) compressed with EO, is this indeo? Divx tool gets stuck in alert loop:

handle_error():case ck_unknown:
reached end of file in chunk other than 'movi' or 'idx1'

movie info in qt says format is mpg4?

data rate at 246.9 Kbytes/second- is this gonna look like crap on a dvd?

[Uncle Skeleton]

oh yeah apparently OS X can't read VCDs, but VLC can (I've heard this but never had occaision to actually use a VCD). You can try copying it in OS 9 or you can try the unpublicized conversion features of VLC

as I explained in the link above, 'MPG4' in an avi usually means MS-MPEG4v1, for which there is a quicktime codec for OS X and which is the only codec where you have to change the fourCC (to MP41) because of a namespace collision with Apple's mpeg4 codec. EO-Video is just the program that was used to compress it.

250 KBytes/s sounds very high for an MSMPEG video. I would guess that it's actually KBits, but it might be bytes if it's higher than normal resolution or something