Status of VCD creation with Mac OS...

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What's the current status of building VCDs on the mac? Any preferred applications, etc? I've been toying with idiscwriter, which does a fairly decent job.. however, I'd love to be able to set up entry points, etc in my VCDs.. their higher level program, VCDMaker, requires a hardware key and is a bit too expensive for the hobbiest level I am at.. However, when I look to the WinXX camp, I see quite a few apps for VCD development..

So is there anything new out there for the mac? Any good combinations that you've come up with to put together the best VCDs?

Thanks!

-- Driph (vcd@flummox.com), December 09, 2000

Answers

MAC is never been supported or the prices are WAY TO expensive. Better and cheaper to go to Windows anyway. Throw your mac out or just use it for what it was made for. Email and basic web surfin, and load runner.

-- Lu (lurker@infospace.net), December 10, 2000.

You can use iDiscWriter by QUERY software to burn your own VCD's easily.

you can find them at : http://www.netviewdisc.com/

-- Matt Yonan (mnmatt@mediaone.net), December 11, 2000.


I so wish that folks would stop the immature trashing of one OS over the other. Yes it is true that there are few to no shareware programs etc for the Mac. And yes it is true that you can't do the fancy menus yet. But you can do VCDs on a Mac.

I have been using Astarte's M.Pack to make Toast friendly mpeg files. I have Cleaner for doing mpegs for the web and toast compatibility is in the current version (or so the manual says, but apparently it was buggy and, according to the company, should be ready with the update that is about to go out)

I have had Virtual PC on my Mac for a while and use several Windows programs that way. I'm currently toying around with some of the menu making stuff to see if I can make a disk image that Toast will accept that way.

-- Arcadia (arcadiaproductions@swbell.net), January 04, 2001.


The next Mac version of Toast (5.0) will have VCD-making abilities. It's under the new name of Roxio and is supposed to come out in the Spring 2001.

-- Jim (jr9389@hotmail.com), March 08, 2001.

I'm sure Toast 5 is nice, but there is nothing wrong with using Toast 4.1 to burn a VCD. I just did one and it worked flawlessly on 5 different players I checked it on.

I created the mpeg stream from a DV file using Cleaner 5 with the MPEG Charger. I'm not sure if you need to charger to do MPEG-1. Of course the cost for 5+the charger is about $1,000 so you'd better be getting it for more than MPEG-1 stuff and VCDs!

The only thing I'm trying to do now is to create any interactivity at all for a VCD. The only thing that I've heard of for a Mac is the iDisc Writer from Query. But that seems to have gone out of date a while ago.

Oh well, guess I'll just have to make DVDs now.

-- JN (jnatiuk@mac.com), June 21, 2001.



Philips Made the best professional MAC VCD production program in the 90's called Video Toolkit 2.0. You can make Menus with hot spots, and numbered selections. I have been making interactive CDi's and VCD's for yesrs with this program. BUT!!! it doesnt work on a G3/G4 mac, I use my Apple WGS 910. Philips is not supporting the program anymore. They are developing a SVCD MAC program as we speak, due out December 2001.

-- Nick Fish (nick@mnmparty@aol.com), July 21, 2001.

Does anyone has VideoCD 2.0 toolkit for MAC ? Although I saw Nick Fish mention it shouldn't work on a G4, but I also have a normal PowerPC 603. Which could do the job also very nicely.

By the way, who said Philips is busy with MAC, I'm living in the Netherlands not far from those guys. And as far as I know, there ain't coming a new package. They don't even consider planning such a program(s). That's what they told me. Please let me know who told you this information, so I can check what's really going on overthere.

So please, let someone be so gentle too let others also have the ability for creating VCD's with menu's!! And put it somewhere to download. I would be very , very, very greatfull....

-- sander v/d knaap (vdknaap@wanadoo.nl), August 19, 2001.


I too would be interested if anyone would show a link to download Video Toolkit 2.0.

-- Carmelo Madamba (madamba@acenet.net.au), August 20, 2001.

I found this utility on some carracho server: VideoCD Maker Personal 2.0E.img. Althought I have not tested it, because i'm not interested in menu creation. I just want to have my VHS movies in VCD. If you want to have this sotf, contact me by e-mail. By the way, I'm interested on SVCD creation. If someone else is interested too, I would like to meet on some chat and discuss some things. I think thats better and faster than a forum... ;-)

-- MarKos (markus2@nettaxi.com), September 02, 2001.

There are a few ways to make VCDs on a MAC, I have converted just about all of my VHS movies to VCD to preserve the quality and archive them. I used to use Astarte M. Pack and Cleaner 5 and then burn them with Toast. But now the new Toast 5 has that feature built in, the only problem is that any single VCD clip longer than 8 minutes will start to go out of sync with the audio and so I have to break my files into 50 individual clips which is very annoying I own some store bought VCDs that are one big 650MB MPEG file with perfect audio/video sync. so far Toast 5 is probably the best bet but I would like to make some menus if anyone out there knows how.

-- Bean (beanbandit98@yahoo.com), September 03, 2001.


I'm using the Toast Titanium VCD extension to make my VCD file out of iMovie and I'm getting terrible results. Extremely lossy. Does anyone know a better mpeg compressor to use. Is there a way to make toast compatable mpegs out of Quicktime Pro? I cant' figure it out.

-- BC (bradfordcheng@yahoo.com), October 11, 2001.

The best Mac MPEG-I encoder I know of is ASTARTE's M.Pack. It can create MPEG-I in all bitrates (including VCD and SVCD), it is very fast and its quality is quite good. It can also create MPEG-II. AFAIK, Apple bought the engine from ASTARTE and included it in DVD Studio... The latest release is AFAIK 3.5.1. Future updates (e.g. AltiVec support) are not likely. But the encoder should be reasonably fast :)

Best, woody

-- woody (nowhere@loopback.edu), October 26, 2001.


uh - I forgot: ASTARTE also developed Toast eventually selling it to Adaptec/Roxio later. It had full support for M.Pack since Toast 3.0 IIRIC. So - since personally untested - it shoud work nicely.

greetz, woody

-- woody (nowhere@loopback.edu), October 26, 2001.


I tried burning a Video CD using Quicktime 5, selecting "Export Movie to Toast Video CD", and in Toast Titanium 5.0.2 selected "Video CD" under the "Other" menu. Popped it in the DVD player and it didn't work. Why?

-- mike (mike@yahoo.com), January 07, 2002.

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