Hi there, I am trying to convert a movie written on a CD so that I could watch it not only on my computer, but also on DVD player (DVD player does not recognisze it). It is indicated on my DVD player that it supports DVD, VCD, SVCD and MP3. The CD I'm struggling with has file structure like DVD disc (files with VOB, BUP and IFO extensions), but when I try to open them with a converter a message "failed to parse" or "not valid DVD" appears. The files on the CD are about 670 Mb, the movie is on 2 CDs. When playing the CD on my computer a small sign MPEG4 is shown on the bottom right corner of the monitor.

Then I found a converter named Honestech Mpeg converter v.4.0 which seems to be able to open the CD and convert it. After conversion my DVD player was able to open the CD, however the picture occupied only about 2/3 of the TV screen - not in the middle, but in upper left corner (there was black stripe on the bottom of the screen and another one on the right side of the screen). The picture was small but seems like no part of it has been cut out.

Any ideas what the problem might be? Thanks!

-- Aigars Strupišs (strupiss@lanet.lv), August 20, 2004

Answers

This is VERY strange. Honestech MPEG converter converts MPEG-4 video to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. That's probably why you see a small MPEG4 sign - you have MPEG-4 video. The strange thing is that you say you see IFO, VOB, etc. files. These are meaningless for MPEG-4. My recommendation is that you download TMPGenc (http://www.tmpgenc.net) and try to convert the MPEG-4 video with it. The MPEG-4 video file should end in .AVI, although if you are seeing IFO, etc. files someone may have deliberately given the file the wrong name. MPEG-4 videos often have strange resolutions that are not valid for other formats. These resolutions are used because they reduce the size of the encoded file. My best guess is that Honestech has a problem with the resolution of your video file (maybe it didn't convert it to a valid VCD or SVCD resolution but kept the resolution) or there is a problem with the codec used to make the MPEG-4 video. Maybe you will need to install a codec. http://www.dvdrhelp.com has some guides on converting MPEG-4 (also called DivX) to other formats. http://www.doom9.net has some useful DivX software and some guides.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), August 25, 2004.