[milhaus]

Now that Toast can simply turn a regular mpeg stream into a VCD, my question is about quality. I have a huge collection of 600MB mpegs (Buffy episodes) that I'm making into VCDs (for use in OS X obviously ;-)). I'm seeing quality reduction using this method, as opposed to having VCD gear change the mpeg into a .bin file first? Anybody else, or am I just imagining things?

[GreenMnM]

Well, there is no way to adjust the settings in the Toast export plug-in so there's no way to really tell what is going on when the files are encoded. The VCDs I have made with Toast 5 have an extra ".mov" file stored on the VCD, this file is nice because it can be played with the QuickTime Player software. Unfortunately, it is also taking up quite a bit of space on the CD. I can only assume that Toast is giving up some quality of MPEG encoding in order to have room on the CD to save the extra ".mov" file (commercial VCDs do not have these files).

By the way, what do you mean by "for use in OS X obviously"??? OS X does not support VCD format CDs yet. Have you found a work around for this?

-Doug

[milhaus]

Was joking about X. The only workaround - I wouldn't even call it that - is a program called MAC VCDX which basically turns the VCD into a regular quicktime file which you can then burn and view in QuickTime on X. I also found out that the quality loss was due to my having dual monitors on my pismo. Took the external off (non-mirrored) and it was alright again.