Dear friends,

1. Will Image file which is saved to cd-rom, then copy back to HD when we want to make another copy, degrade the VCD quality ?

2. Will do a copy cd directly from VCD we've created also degrade the VCD quality ?

3. Or would it be better to save the "un-burnt" .mpg file to cd-rom for later on to be copied back to HD when we wanna make the duplicate another time ?

I'm sorry for asking this stupid question, but I just want to save some space in my HD, without having to store the image file or the .mpg file in my HD but cd-rom.

Any kind of help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Sunar.

-- Sunar Karjadi (rekotomo@denpasar.wasantara.net.id), June 07, 2000

Answers

I vote for 3. Make a master copy of the .mpg on good media then you can burn VCD's from it any time you want. You don't even need to copy back to HD if your CD-ROM is fast enough, besides, most VCD burning software I've used creates a temporary image on your HD anyway. (Adaptec ECDC 3.5, CEQuadrat VideoPack 4).

-- Frank G (frankG74@hotmail.com), June 07, 2000.

I think you will find option 3 is limited to a track size of about 62 minutes, as a raw mpeg-1 74 minute video track will not fit on a 650M data CD. A VCD will hold 748M on the normal "74 minute 650M" CD-R or RW media.

http://aussieo1.freeservers.com

discussions page.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), June 08, 2000.

Sorry typo error:

http://aussie01.freeservers.com

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), June 08, 2000.

I've wrestled with this and can say #3 is the way to go. I used to make VCD copies from the original created VCDs by using Easy CD Copier, for example. I didn't have any choice because the original *.mpg files have long since been deleted from the HDD. But I noticed that whatever imperfections in the original VCD are there (momentary blockiness, image freezing probably due to the inevitable scratch on the disc surface that accumulate in number over time no matter how carefully the disc is handled) get copied over and on playback of the copy the problems are even worse (even more blockiness than the original, etc.). I am told, for one, it's because the way *.dat files are recorded error correction is less robust than its *.mpg counterpart, etc. So, I just use the original *.mpg files to create a bonafide CD-ROM, and use that as source when I want to re-create a VCD. Indeed, surprisingly, the copies I create this way show fewer to no errors compared with copying the original VCD directly.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@yahoo.com), June 10, 2000.

I have noticed of late that the same mpeg file can encode with errors like those blocky patches EM talks of and actually I have had to just do another burn to clear the problem - pain in the a...., guess that is caused by a burner problem??

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), June 13, 2000.