[MPlayer-users] Okay, I am lost here....

[rcooley]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 21:26:44 -0500
Andrew Konosky <TerranAce007 at comcast.net> wrote:

> Using Mencoder and AcidRip, I did a 2 pass Mpeg4 layer (DivX) encoding

Why?  MPEG4 is slow, and you need MPEG1 in the end.  Why convert from
DVD to MPEG4 to MPEG1?  

> and I kept the widescreen ascpet ratio the same and  used a 640x275
> resolution 

VCD needs to be 352x240 (NTSC) in the end, so why use 640x275?

> For audio, I used 256kbps mp3 as the compression. 

The audio codec is going to have to be 44100Hz MP2 in the end.

> Since the movie was long, I created 2 files, and it ended up taking 
> AMOST 4 HOURS to encode after making 2 passes on each of the two
> blocks! 

That's nothing...  MPEG-4 often takes much longer.  It would have been
much faster if you used MPEG1/2 video, a lower resolution, and MP2
audio.

And if you think mencoder is slow, just wait until you start using
mpeg2enc (mjpegtools program to encode to MPEG1/2)!
 
> Now I have two ~650mb files, part1.avi and part2.avi and they are good
> quality widescreen videos. I want to put these onto a VCD and
> hopefully play them in my DVD player (If it supports VCD...)

Not likely...  First of all, VCD doesn't support widescreen, so you're
going to have to add black bars to the top & bottom, which further
reduces the already tiny resolution.  The quality is going to be very
poor when you re-encode to VCD.

BTW, it wasn't smart to split the file...  When you convert to MPEG1
you're going to want to use a completely different bitrate for video &
audio, so you'll want to split it in some other spot.  Those 650MB files
coold end up too large to fit, or very small and waste space.

> K3B only supports MPEG files, so I need and .mpg file rather than the 
> .avi files that I have now. 

You don't just need to convert to an MPEG file, you need to completely
re-encode your files.

> VCDimager also needs an mpeg file, so I am lost as
> to what I do? 

> 1.) Rip DVD to MPEG1,2, or 4
> 2.) Use MJPEG tools to create VCD compatible MPEG1

Skip step 1.  Encode directly from DVD into VCD-compatible MPEG1.

> 3.) Use VCDimager to create the VCD image
> 4.) Burn the VCD image to a CD-R

> Can someone help me out?

I'm not sure...  You seem to entirely misunderstand what a VCD is and
isn't.  

Personally, I would recomend going with SVCD instead of VCD (higher
resolution, more flexible, supports widescreen, etc).  The script
"divx2svcd" is in the TOOLS directory of MPlayer's source code package,
so you could just use that, and let it do all the work for you.  Give it
the DVD as the source, and it can even split the file for you if it ends
up too big to fit on a single disc.