[dfbennett]

Hi,
I've got a Sawtooth G4 350 with 512mb of ram. I've got Quicktime Pro and Toast 5 as well as the freeware VCDGear. Here's what I'm trying to do. I have several MPG files of some U2 music videos. I'd like to burn these to a VCD so I can watch them on my TV using my sony dvd player. I was able to burn a Quicktime .mov file to a VCD using Toast and it played fine. However, the one MPG file I was able to burn to a VCD using toast doesn't work on my DVD player(it hows like 1 frame of the video just frozen on screen). I'd like to try it with some of the other files but it keeps telling me that there are invalid MPG files or something along those lines. I tried to convert one of them first to a quicktime .mov file but alas, it doesn't retain the sound . Is it possible to do what I'm trying using freeware or shareware and what I have? I just can't seem to figure it out. Also, should I be able to do it, how would I convert a PAL MPG to NTSC in order to put it on a VCD? I hope someone can give me some guidance. Thanks

[jac]

Check out VCD Help
I'm sure you'll find what you need to know there (and a lot more too).

[elrond]

Question: What tools have you already tried to use to convert the mpg files to qt? I'm not familiar with VCDgear. I assume you already tried to use it to do your converstion. Are the mpg files mpg1 or mpg2? It they are mpeg 2 then I'm not suprised that the conversion to vcd didn't work. I believe that VCDGear only deals with mpeg-1 files. I'm not sure though. FYI: VCDs have the following parameters (taken from VCD Helper)
Video:
1150 kbit/sec MPEG-1
352 x 240 pixels
29,97 frames/second
(23,976 frames/second NTSC Film)

Audio:
224 kbit/sec MPEG-1 Layer2

The tools listed hear may be of help--> http://www169.pair.com/lukifer/dvd.html

There are several tools that will do various conversion/manipulations on mpeg files. I've listed a few below. You can get these at http://www.versiontracker.com

MPEG Stream Guillotine 0.2b - Fixes MPEG-2 files with bad headers (it may work for mpeg1 files)
MPEG2Decoder 1.4 - Decodes MPEG-2 files into usable QuickTime movies
Movie2MPEG 0.1d6 - QuickTime movie to MPEG-1 converter
MacMPEG2Decoder 1.0b5r2 - decodes MPEG-2 files into QuickTime movies
bbDMUX 1.0b-d1 - MPEG 1/2 demultiplexer into the original component streams

From your message it seems like your trying to go from PAL to NTSC. To do this you may need a more advanced tools such as: Media Cleaner MPEG Charger from http://www.terran-int.com. It's expensive ~$1,100. But from the description on their website, it sounds like it'll do what you're looking for.

From terran website:
"Cleaner MPEG Charger is the software-only MPEG encoding option for Cleaner 5. Charger integrates seamlessly with Cleaner 5, adding comprehensive control over MPEG-2 encoding and enhancing Cleaner 5's MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 support with variable bitrate encoding. Use Cleaner 5 and Charger to turn all popular video, audio and animation file formats into MPEG streams for DVD Video, Video CD, CD-ROM, digital broadcasting and broadband webcasting. Together, Cleaner 5 and Cleaner MPEG Charger enhance your MPEG-enabled streaming workflow."