Copying a 745 MB .dat file to CDR

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I have a VCD that was copied to a hard drive. I would like to write a CDR of this. Problem, this .dat file is 743 MB in size. How did it fit on the original VCD, and how do I copy this to CDR. I'd like to remove the copy from my hard drive.

-- Andrew (asinger@conti.co.za), June 05, 2001

Answers

Do you want to make a conventional CD-ROM or another VCD?? If you want to make a CD-ROM it's best you extract the *.dat back to *.mpg for best error correction. When you do so the *.mpg will be slightly bigger than the *.dat. Either way you can always try 80min, 90min, and 99min CD-Rs. A CD-R labeled 74min has about 780MB capacity tops. When used in an ordinary ISO9660 CDFS CD-ROM manner to store data, after the lead-in/out and error correction is taken into account, only 650MB capacity is left for the actual data to be put in. MPEG-1 and CD-DA have error correction that's less critical and so more space is available for the audio/video data. You do the math: if an MPEG-1 stream is about 172KB/s, then for 74mins it needs about 764MB to be put in. Then we need a few more KB for the other data on a VCD when it's authored. If you see this 764MB figure and take it as absolute then you will think it will not fit on a 650MB labeled CD-R when it actually will, as a VCD. But as a file on CD-ROM, it will not unless you probably use a 90min CD-R, which will have a data capacity around 800MB.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), June 05, 2001.

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