Firstly, I would like to update a recent statement I made about my Cyberlink PowerPlayer program not being effected by higher speed cdrom's:

Last night I processed some vision taken with a Sony TR?? 900 minidv camera which was sourced from my friends analogue Matrox Runner capture card. 4 separate vision files were encoded with the LSX encoder from a direct 352 x 288 avi capture. Both Winoncd & Adaptec 3.5 CD-RW burns ran fast on both the 24x and the 6x burner as a player. This morning all files were running fast on my 36x at work. That is the first time I have had that problem in 7 hours of home generated vcd's.

Only 3 of the 4 dat files played on the computer and on the DVD player from the winoncd 3.5 burn - the 4th locked up solid and would not play. The winoncd burn played smoothly on the dvd player and vision quality was a notch above my D8 based vision - superb stuff.

All 4 files played on the computer from the Adaptec burn. None of course played on the DVD player as they were all in the "segment" folder.

Is there a limit to the number of dat vision files one can place on a VCD as I have never been able to play more than 3? One disk I received from Austria had 14 vision files of which only 3 would play also.

Who said this was easy? Comments anyone!

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), September 20, 1999

Answers

I am a bit confused with what you refer to as 'vision' files. Okay let's refer to two types of .dat files here: 1. complete audio/video track files that have a total CBR of ~170Kbytes/sec 2. audio only, video only, or still image files with or without audio that may or may not have varying bit rates; the audio can have up to 384kbits/sec BR Files of type 1. are placed in the MPEGAV folder and can be recognized because their filenames are always avseqxx.dat or musicxx.dat where xx is a number up to 99. Files of type 2. are placed in the SEGMENT folder and can be recognized because their filenames are always itemxxxx.dat where xxxx can be up 9999. This is White Book prescripted ideal scenario. If it's any help, here are my observations: Adaptec Easy CD Creator 3.5x, which is one of those you use, is known to willy-nilly place files where it chooses; if complete audio/video tracks are put on the segment folder then, as you've found out, the created VCD may not play on your settop DVD player. WinOnCD avoids this because it doesn't create ver 2.0 VCDs (which are menu-branching VCDs that make extensive use of the segment folder to put these menu items); the created VCDs may have a segment folder but it's empty. Legit straight-play movie VCDs mostly do not have a segment folder and the mpegav folder contains just one long avseqxx.dat or musicxx.dat file. Karaoke VCDs have tracks galore in the mpegav folder (typically ten or more), with more items in the segment. If this is anything to go by then you can indeed create VCDs with more than 3 playable tracks. Easy CD says you can have as many as 99 playable tracks in the mpegav folder. I personally have made multitrack VCDs with Easy CD, but here again are some instabilities I've noted with 3.5x: -When a track is less than 7 mins long Easy CD tends to either put it in the segment folder, or even if correctly put in the mpegav folder still won't play on a set-top (!); -Making ver 2.0 VCDs is chancy in that what worked now and produced a stable VCD with menus and start sequences where and when you expected them to be may or may not be duplicated again later even if you swear you followed exactly the same steps and used the same files from the same locations. -Straight-play VCDs with tracks at least 10 mins long and longer that get correctly put in the mpegav folder can be more or less reliably created and repeated. -mpeg files that are known to be White Book compliant in some other mastering apps are rejected a lot of times by 3.5x; when they indeed are accepted you wonder why when you didn't change anything So, I've uninstalled 3.5x and am back to and reduced to re-installing ver 3.01d. I use mainly DVMPEG 5.0 for encoding and the least 3.01d can do is accept files produced by DVMPEG without fuss. We wonder if ver 4.0 is any better. The one ver 2.0 VCD app that wins all the time is VideoPack 4, and a lot of legit karaoke VCDs around, I've been told have been authored using this. It always correctly puts files where they should be in the segment and mpegav folders. But it's too expensive for me. If you can indeed only play 3 out of any number of other files on a VCD in your PC, then something else is wrong. To find out if it's caused by the CD-R mastering app go get a legit karaoke VCD (not a movie VCD, and not on CD-R) and see if the 3-file limit is still there. Please tell me what else you find out. :)

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), September 21, 1999.

Thanks indeed for taking the time to explain some of the tricks, I will try to source a disk from our chinatown as in Adeliade, South Australia vcd's are generally not available.

Sorry about the "vision" bit, got lost there - the normal .dat files in the mpegav folder generated from tracks 2+ in winoncd.

Its still a worry that a 14 track disk home made in Austria and sent to me also has a problem in the number of tracks that I can play back, either he has the same generation problem or its just my system and my dvd player??????

Short of buying/changing programs to test the rendering, encoding and burning phases I am not sure how to get reliability of product. I have reliability of playback on my computer albeit from a maximum of two tracks but some stop partway in on the dvd player and that is a worry as currently I am having to do a check burn on a CD-RW.

Just did that last night with a new 40 minute track and it stopped playback on the dvd player 22 seconds into the presentation, the first that early in playback. So it cannot be used on any dvd player but it plays beautifully all the way thro' on the computer. Imagine the frustration of that if one was doing it commercially. That is 10 hours of encoding down the drain. So does the fault lie in resizing in premier 5.1, does it lie in the encoding or is it a burn fault?

My advise to anyone about to purchase a dvd player for playing vcd's is to find a shop that will allow you to play at least 15 minutes from your test CD-R before you even consider buying. Make a test cd- r of at least 4 tracks. I was aware of my two track problem but bought my DVD player completely unaware of the stop mid track problem. Nice simple player for DVD's and audio discs but.......

Thanks guys & girls

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), September 21, 1999.

Just dyin' of curiosity here: what's the brand/model of your DVD player??

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), September 22, 1999.

Philips DVD 725, probably dumped on the Australian market as I was not able to find specs on the Philips site.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), September 22, 1999.

play 15 minutes> Ever heard of 'fast forward'? ;)

At any rate my father has a video archive of all kinds of things he recorded over the years, including tons of monty python stuff, and I was thinking how cool it would be if I could somehow put one scene per track on there, so I can forward to "track 19- the Larch" if I want to, instead of using the always clunky 'fast forward'. This is a CD, fastforward and rewinding should be eliminated. Anyone ever tried creating a VCD from snippets/scenes that worked in their DVD player?

-- M.Artenbaum (marten@falsehope.com), September 23, 1999.

Hi Marten

Guess this posting answers what your dad wants to do - end product a VCD - sounds more like its what you want to do hahaha?

I certainly do not have the experience of making multiple track vcd's that work, as I have said previously I can only play 2 tracks until last night. My dvd player does not indicate which of those tracks is actually playing so I have no idea how you make a "play any track" vcd by selection.

Mr Martinez tends to indicate that a version 2 vcd is required and that will only come from a better program than adaptecs 3.5 or 4. It seems that winoncd 3.5 will not allow that selective mode to be invoked. So I do not know about fast forward, I would be using the "next" button and not really knowing what track being played. Like most say, we get what we pay for but that is except for Adaptec.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), September 23, 1999.