I see a lot of people on Windows having good luck making VideoCDs. I am on a Mac and am looking for advice on creating VideoCDs. I can get the video to look pretty good, however, no luck with sound yet.

Are there any Mac users out there who are having successful CD-R burns of VideoCDs.

I have made test VideoCDs. The video shows up on my Pioneer 525, but audio is garbled. I then take the same test VideoCD to an electronics store and it will only play on a high end Sony DVD with the sound working, all other DVDs either have garbled sound or dont play at all.

I am using ASTARTE M.Pack 3.0.1 and Toast 4 Deluxe on Maxell CD-R for Music CDs.

I would love to use Media Cleaner Pro, but from what I understand, Toast will only except MPEG-1 files that were created with Astarte software.

I would love some Mac advice.

Thank you,

Tyler@Lemke

-- Tyler Lemke (Tyler@Lemke.com), November 03, 1999

Answers

Good luck sir - as a fellow Mac user (and Windows user too, mostly be necessity) I've had no luck getting Astarte to produce good quality output for the audio.

On the other hand, their CD-Copy product is perfectly capable of reading VideoCDs and producing Toast-Ready streams so you can re-burn the tracks on a new VideoCD via Toast 3.5.X. (I don't have Toast 4.)

I'm very disappointed that Toast 4 doesn't appear to have rectified this problem.

As far as I know, there is only one other product which produces VideoCDs on the Mac, and it's called VCDMaker:

http://www.videocd2.com/vcdmaker/packages.html

I have heard of NOBODY who has ever used this, and since it's expensive I'm dubious about putting down this much money for it.

Good luck and post any successes (or failures)!

-- Jim B (jimbo987@my-deja.com), November 04, 1999.

I gave up on Toast !. I tried burning VCD from files created by Dazzle USB version and it won't accept the file. Instead, Toast suggested using Astare M - Pack. Is this a conspiracy or what !. Has anyone tried using virtual window and use EZ CD creator ?. Is there any other S/w for Mac besides the expensive one mention previously ?. Kiam Oey

-- Kiam Oey (kiam.t.oey@boeing.com), November 05, 1999.

I was able to burn a VCD from an MPEG file on my Mac - but I had to use my OrangePC 620 DOS card running Win98 and EZ-CD Creator Deluxe (VCD Creator). Surprisingly, the DOS card was able use my SCSI CDRecorder (at a slower write speed - 2x) and create the VCD from an MPEG file on my Mac. If anyone has tried VPC or SoftWindows, let us know your results.

-- Bill Wong (bill_wong@magic.ca), November 09, 1999.

I hear ya, I've suffered the same fate: I've been using Astarte M.Pack 3.02 + Toast 4.0 on a Mac G3 to TRY and make VCD's out of MPEG files that play just fine in their original state, but get garbled (often w/no sound) in their Toast-produced VCD state.

My process: Start w/MPEG file (QT 4.0 "get info" says it's got only 1 track total called "mpeg track". Presumably this contains both A&V) -- > use M.Pack to convert to Toast-ready MPEG/VCD format --> use Toast 4.0 to burn --> VCD w/no sound and only video. Ugh! Help! Any suggestions?

-- Dave Winkler (dwinkler@cs.cmu.edu), January 25, 2000.

Hi, I have made several VCD's on my mac. I am using Avid VideoShop 3.0 and ASTARTE M.Pack + Toast 3.5.7. What i found out is that i can't use a mpeg movies in M.Pack because it will not see the sound. All my files have to be a ?.mov format( quicktime). If you have an older mac you can use a program called Sparkle 2.4 to split Mpeg files back to Quicktime format. I can't seem to make this program work on my G3.

Hope this hel

-- Paul Mac (pmac6320@ca.freei.net), February 03, 2000.

See http://www.moviemac.com/create_movies/create_movies.html for a step by step method using Astart and Toast. Key is to start with quicktime. Heuris MPEG pro also makes toast ready files, but thats $500.

Yos

-- Yos (Yos25@mail.com), March 08, 2000.

I have had good luck using Astarte M. Pact, Toast 3.5.7 and Editing Final Cut Pro. The key is that some Video CD, CD-R, CD-RW seem to troubles with playback. My discs play perfect in Philips brand DVD Players. (Even ones that don't say they support Video CD) The Pioneer DV-525 seems to be problematic with this set up. I did get good results out of a high end Sony DVD Player. Video looked the best on the Philips DVD players. Anxious to try out the Apex Player. BTW... Used the TDK CD-R's on a spindle worked great with the Philips

-- John Mortensen (mort@thinkatron.com), March 17, 2000.

Philips made a mac VCD authoring program in the 80's. Its called VCD Toolit. It Multiplexes the AV, and lets you program a VCD with menus, with hot spots. Click maps)

Query VCD Maker Personal works great on the mac also.

-- Nick Russo (nick@mnment.com), June 02, 2001.

Hi,

I've struggled a bunch with this as well. Finally, Toast 5 works with standard mpg streams, which means it works with Media Cleaner 5. If you are using Adobe Premiere, you can export directly to cleaner, import into toast and burn the VCD.

It's not bad. However, Nero for the PC still seems to work better, especially if you just want to burn a bunch of JPGs to VCD.

Bhavesh

-- Bhavesh Patel (veshair@veshman.com), September 09, 2001.