[ilesh]

There is a previous post on this topic in 2000 but the info was not very conclusive. Therefore I am asking this question again.

I elected to have my wedding footage given to me in VCD form by the video company that recorded my wedding. This was so I could replicate the VCD with ease to send to friends and family.

I copied all the files from the original VCD to my hard drive. I tried to drag all this files onto Toast Titanium but get an error message when I do so. So then I made an image of the files. Toast would let me encode this image as a data file but not in VCD format. I burnt the disc as a data file and then tried it on my DVD player (which played the original disc without problems). Unfortunately the DVD player seems to think the disc I burnt is a CD and so I get no sound or picture.

How can I make VCD copies of my original VCD to play on commercial DVD players?

Thanking you in advance for your help.

Ilesh

[jtc]

VCDs are multi-session discs, and AFAIK it's a pain to copy them with toast. Hopefully someone will respond with an easier way, but here's my suggestion for now:
On the disc there's a folder called MPEGAV, inside is a .dat file (probably called AVSEQ01.dat), drag that to your hard drive and rename it with a .mpg extension. Now you can startup toast and in the "other" section choose Video CD. drag the mpg file onto toast, and it will make a VCD with that file. If you get an error when you drag the file onto toast then the file is probably not a VCD (352x240, 29.97 fps), it might be a SVCD or XVCD.

[lucylawless]

did you try Toast's copy feature? I believe that makes a byte for byte copy of the CD in your drive (I'm not sure what it does if you only have one drive, but I think it makes some kind of image first to allow it to copy sessions that the MacOS can't read). Anyway, let us know if that works

[dark3lf]

Originally posted by lucylawless:
<STRONG>did you try Toast's copy feature? I believe that makes a byte for byte copy of the CD in your drive (I'm not sure what it does if you only have one drive, but I think it makes some kind of image first to allow it to copy sessions that the MacOS can't read). Anyway, let us know if that works</STRONG>

Yeah, seems to me that this is your best bet. Or look for GNU vcdtools 1.0b on VT. It is a fantastic VCD production tool.

[ilesh]

Thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately they didn't work.

Toast's copy feature starts burning the disc but comes up with an error message about 30 seconds into starting to burn the CD.

Using the AVSEQ01.dat even when renamed .mpg gives the meaasge "AVSEQ01.dat cannot be used to create a Video CD because it contains MPEG data in an unsupported format".

A few wasted CD-Rs and a painstaking search on the net later I have pieced info together from several sources to get the process working so that one can make copies of a VCD that will work on commercial DVD players.

1. In OS 9.1 I started up ASTARTE CD-Copy 2.0.3e. I selected the second track of the VCD which was an mpeg. The first track was an iso. I saved the mpeg as Track 02 MPEG.mpeg on my HD. It is important to save the file as a .mpg file.

2. I then used VCDGear 1.6d � to convert that mpeg file to an mpeg which i could play on my computer. I converted it with the .mpg -&gt; .mpg option in VCDGear.

3. When you are doing .mpg -&gt; .mpg conversions in VCDGear, the sector size of the source mpeg file must be 2324 or it will not work. You can verify the sector size by doing a .mpg -&gt; .bin conversion and viewing output (but cancel right away with cmd-. ). If the sector size is not 2324 (most likely will be 2352) use the options "force read sector size" and set the value to 2324. Don't touch the "force write sector size" option.

4. This process produced a 590 MB movie that could play in Quicktime.

5. I then set Toast Titanium to VCD setting and draged and dropped this file into Toast. Burning this to CD-R gave me a VCD that is playable on commercial DVD machines.

If anyone knows of any simpler ways would be happy to hear about them.

Ilesh

[George Lampman]

Here's something i found that works. Use CharisMac Discribe 5.0 (Demo) to create a disk image of the VCD. I have tried Toast every which way with no success. The demo version of this software lets you create as many images as you want and then burn them with toast or disc burn. not sure if this works. Depending on what kind of format the original disc is in (VCD-SVCD) you will have to set up toast differently.
For a MPEG1 VCD you have to set toast to Video CD and drag the image into toast and burn it.

For SVCD images you'll have to set toast to Disk Image and burn. At least thats what has worked for me. Much easier than extracting the mpg and re encoding the burning.

[maffioso]

You can just copy the MPEG file off the VCD and burn that to another cd, then get Toast to make a VCD out of that...

Easy...

[ReggieX]

Originally posted by ilesh:
<STRONG>Toast's copy feature starts burning the disc but comes up with an error message about 30 seconds into starting to burn the CD.</STRONG>

File -&gt; Save As Disc Image first so you're not trying to copy it directly off the CD. Then use the Video CD option in Toast, click Select and choose "A Video CD Image file"

See if that works.

[dtriska]

You can use VCD Copy X to extract the MPEG file to your hard drive, and then drop the file onto Toast to burn another VCD. VCD Copy X is a little touchy and unstable (it can work fine for 10 rips, and then crash for the next 5), but it will work.

[ilesh]

Originally posted by ReggieX:
<STRONG>

File -&gt; Save As Disc Image first so you're not trying to copy it directly off the CD. Then use the Video CD option in Toast, click Select and choose "A Video CD Image file"

See if that works.</STRONG>

I tried this. No go. Toast comes up with an error message saying it is not the right kind of file to make a VCD.

[jtc]

Since copying the .dat file and renaming it .mpg didn't work, it seems that the mpg is not standard for a VCD (352x240 29.97 fps 1150kbps).

Do you have virtual PC (or easy access to a PC)?

The program I use on windows is called VCDeasy. It has an option to make toast (Mac) disc images. You can download it for free at: http://www.vcdeasy.org/

Copy the .dat file (or use a VCD extractor) and rename it from x.dat to x.mpg. In VCDeasy under settings choose toast (mac) in the CD images options at the bottom. Go back to the (S)VCD section, and choose the Vcd 2.0 button at the top next to VideoCD type. Under CD Writer, choose "no CD Writer Selected" and it will write out a disc image. Hit "go" at the bottom. You should have 3 disc images (videocd_01.img,videocd_02.img,videocd_02pregap.im g,and an xml file) you only need videocd_01.img and videocd_02.img. Copy those to your Mac. In toast select multitack cdrom xa (under other). copy the videocd_01.img file then videocd_02.img. You might want to press select to make sure they're in the right order. videocd_01.img should be 6 seconds - videocd_02.img will probably list the wrong time, but don't worry about that - it reports this based on file size. Burn CD (not session - very important).

[erise]

The reason copying the .dat files to your hard drive and renaming them .mpg didn't work is because dat files are NOT the same as MPEGs.

There is a great program that copies the dat files to your hard drive and makes them into MPEGs. It is called VCD Copy and is included with FreeVCD at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~nathanst/software/freevcd/. Once you've copied the MPEGs to your hard drive, you then should be able to select VCD from toast and drag your MPEGs from there into Toast and burn successfully. I couldn't get VCD Copy to work in OS X but it worked in OS 9 just fine.

(keep in mind I haven't tried this but I think it should work. If you decide to try it please inform me of the results)