What software to convert digital photos to VCD

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I've been waiting for this technology for quite some time. In the last two years, I've managed to take over 2200 digital photographs and would like to put them on VCD to be viewed through my DVD player. The pictures are index/categorized by date on my computer.

The things I'm looking for include (in order of importance): price, picture quality, index/toc and ease of use.

I've read posts about WinonCD which seems nice, but I thought someone mentioned it does not include indexing/TOC. With over 2200+, it would be difficult to quickly find the picture I'm looking for.

Any suggestions or similar experiences with this scenario would be most appreciated.

-- Scott L. Patterson (scott@uniqsys.com), February 22, 2000

Answers

Video Pack 4 will can use High-Res Pictures. About the 2200+ number of pictures, it may be hard to find the picture you are looking for. It just depends on how you plan your Video CD layout.

-- Jay (jlinkhome@yahoo.com), February 22, 2000.

Win On CD 3.7 Power Edition has a new feature called Photo Album. With this feature, you can create a cd which is usable in both a VCD set top player as well as on the PC using either IE or Netscape to browse through the cd.

The software will generate thumbnails automatically for you and also generate menu pages to hold these thumbnails. You use the VCD remote to browse through the images. On the PC, once inserted, the autorun.inf will launch your default browser and you can click on the thumbnails to get to the image you selected.

The file structure has all the directories and files required for a VCD to run in addition to a html folder and the autorun.inf command line.

The DOWNSIZE to Photo Album is the inability to add audio for VCD playback.

Win On CD 3.7 Power Edition has a VCD Extended Editor which functions like Video Pack 4.0. But if you have a lot of images, Photo Album will be easier to manage.

NT

-- NT (i1x@nightmail.com), February 22, 2000.


Like Jay says you will have to think seriously about the VCD structure and answer the question "is the VCD the right vehicle"

I have something like 3500 digital still photographs but they are not on a VCD because there are some restrictions in its use, consider just these few points:

1)on the VCD they are not in a form that is easy to get to. Dats in the Segment folder?

2) your current number system and classifications will go out the window because every thing becomes a sequentual item001.dat onwards in the segment folder. What happens after the 999 is reached? Each file is 345K's so if we assume 700M for the vcd then thats about 2000 stills, twice the available numbering.

3) difficult to individually access if you want to print or retrieve any photographs.

4) enormous amount of work (and skill) require to generate the structure, using mainly non user friendly burner software. How do you index them within the groups so that Item768.dat is the one you want in the 999 avaiable under the numbering system? To say nothing of the fact that its not even a true picture with a true perspective.

In my view a CD with the original files in jpeg form combined with photoalbum software that is available these days is a far better option.

A VCD in my view is a method of putting on a "show" not a storage medium, unless......

What I have done is to burn a normal vcd in Nero for a particular catagory as a "show" (mpeg stream with all the trimmings) and in the first track, the originals are stored for easy access as jpegs from the computer, volume 1 2 3 as the content increases. You cannot do that with VP4 as far as I know it will not allow stuff to be put in the computer track.

Just some comments and a point of view to think about.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 22, 2000.


Have you looked at a software called PhotoToTV ?

-- (atul_khachar@yahoo.com), December 30, 2002.

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