please could anyone tell me what software i would need to make seemless chapters on a vcd? also where can i get said software, thanks for any help. dave

-- dave richman (shadowlands2000@hotmail.com), April 10, 2001

Answers

You cannot make seamless chapters on a VCD; that's one limitation of the White Book format (unlike MPEG-2 for DVD). The closest you can get to that is to create one whole MPEG clip and assign entry points in it. During playback, pressing FF or PREV should make these responses on the exact entry point. The only program I know of that can let you assign entry points is VideoPack4.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), April 11, 2001.

"QUOTE" I'd just thought of a new method of creating a multi-track (as in "chapters" VCD where the tracks play seamlessly into one another. So far, I have created one disc that seems to play perfectly (more testing will follow!). Now, when I say SEAMLESS, I mean it! No brief gap or pause, no little niggle, NOTHING (just like on a DVD). Theory and Introduction I was thinking about how audio CDs can have continuous tracks and then I realised that I could create a VCD to work in the same way. Now, there are no PHYSICAL dividers between audio tracks. One track just merges continuously into another (that's why you don't hear a gap, say, between two tracks on a concert CD). What you see as TRACKS is just logical information written in the table of contents (TOC) of a CD. If anyone has ripped and burnt a copy of a CD with continuous tracks, you would have realised that the only way to do it perfectly is to use a program like CDR-Win; read the CD sector by sector and then create a cue/bin file (which is done automatically of course). If you rip one track at a time, more often than not, you may hear a slight skip or pause between tracks. In this way, I realised that it would be close to impossible to create a perfectly seamless multi- track VCD with multiple MPEG files (i.e., one for each track). The Method Software required: - VCDImager 0.4.0 + Win32 GUI - CDR-Win Now, you need to have a VCD compliant MPEG that contains all the video that you want on the disc (e.g., say half the movie). Now play the MPEG on Windows Media Player, and write down the times (min:sec) of the parts of the movie that you want as the beginning of a new chapter. OK. Now, load the MPEG into VCDImager and create the cue/bin file. I suggest that you use the Win32 GUI, or else you'll be fumbling with the command prompt console. After a while, you'll have the bin file (the disc image of the CD) and the cue file (the cuesheet). Now the critical step... What you have to realise is that you can edit the cuesheet! This means that you can make as many CD tracks as you like (well, < 99). This is what the cuesheet looked like originally for my VCD:

code: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

FILE "C:Temporarymulan.bin" BINARY TRACK 01 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 00:00:00 TRACK 02 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 00:13:20

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What this means is: FILE --> this is just the location of the bin file TRACK 01 --> this starts at 00:00:00 (beginning of the disc), this track is where stuff like menus and the CD-I bumper is placed. TRACK 02 --> this is the track with the movie, it starts at 00:13:20 (13 seconds and a bit, i.e., the first track took up 13 seconds of space on the CD). Now, say I wanted to add two additional chapters (so having three in total). The first chapter will obviously start at the beginning of the movie, the second say at 20 minutes into the film and the third at 40 minutes. To do this, I would have to edit the CUESHEET so that it now looks like this:

code: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

FILE "C:Temporarymulan.bin" BINARY TRACK 01 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 00:00:00 TRACK 02 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 00:13:20 TRACK 03 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 20:13:20 TRACK 04 MODE2/2352 INDEX 01 40:13:20

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

Think about it for a while, and it should be obvious what I've done. Then all that's required is to load the cuesheet up (make sure that you check for errors!) and burn the CD with CDR-Win. Why does it work? VCDImager makes VCDs which are recognised not as version 2, but version 1.1! This means that the discs are played with PBC turned off. This means that the discs are played sequentially from the first video track to the last (disregarding any menu information -- not that there will be any if you've made it with VCDImager). Remember the continous tracks audio CD analogy? The VCD player in reality plays the VCD from start to finish (there are no real gaps between tracks). If you press previous or next on your VCD player, you can skip chapters (just like a DVD). I would appreciate comments and suggestions from any other people who've done this. Regards. --------- ---------

-- Lucas A (skywalker_luc@hotmail.com), June 21, 2001.

Please help me to make a vcd that has chapters when I try what you have wrote and try to play it on my computer's DVD player the dvd program tries to look for chapter, but does not find any. Please help me or tell my how to make a VCD that has chapter in it like a dvd. I would really be a help. thanks, John

-- John Lutherman (ejerkel@hotmail.com), July 05, 2001.

Please reference the original article and author!! http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=26856&forum=1

Read the thread on the development of this particular method. It is a non-standard way of creating VCDs and does not work on many players.

Regards, Michael Tam

-- vitualis (mtam@fastlink.com.au), August 22, 2001.