How do you ripp a VCD to a SVCD

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How do you rip a VCD to a SVCD or DVD!

-- Nick (planetpiccolo@hotmail.com/), February 28, 2001

Answers

Why? The quality of a VCD is marginal at best. Going to DVD or SVCD won't improve it. Plus to be SVCD compliant the bit rate will be around 2.3 Mb/s which means you may have to split it to multiple discs. Look at it this way .. VCD uses a one quart container. SVCD uses a gallon container. No matter how you try, when you pour that one quart of VCD into the gallon SVCD container .. you STILL have only one quart.

But if you want to "play" .. here's what to do.

First convert the VCD *.dat file to a proper standard mpeg. (no just renaming the *.dat to *.mpg won't work most of the time)

Then convert the raw mpeg-1 to AVI. (best would be uncompressed)

Then re-size your VCD (originally for example ntsc 352x240) to proper sizing for SVCD or DVD (480x480 or 720x480)

Then re-encode the AVI to Mpeg-2, variable bit rate. (average 2.3 Mb/s for SVCD and 6-9 Mb/s for DVD.

Now get an SVCD encoder (I-Author, Nero etc) and burn your disc.

For DVD you'll need a DVD recorder and authoring program. Mult- thousands of dollars (US)

Note along the way, that 650 Mb Mpeg-1 will require many gigabytes of storage space for DVD and about 1.5 GB for SVCD. With DVD you'll have to split up the AVI to keep it under the Windows 2/4 GB limit.

You may see a very very small quality difference due to the superior playback of the higher and variable bit rate of SVCD or DVD, but it will be almost not noticable.

So after all that I ask again .. Why?

-- Rich (rich@pcphotovideo.com), March 02, 2001.


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