I am new to making vcd's (actually I'm not quite computer literate either) but have purchased my first computer with a cdrw and have downloaded movies. There seems to be an endless # of formats? ie. Dvx, Avi Mpg superMpg.....which seem to need to be coverted to mpeg1. Could someone recommend software that will do this as painlessly as possible. Although quality is important also and I would prefer to learn this process only once. I have also noticed that the movies are generally larger that the 700mb available on the cd's and looking through your postings I see that this can be fixed with something called overburn. I now use CDcreator Roxio for making cd's, is this software capable of overburning? Thanks for your help.

-- mary rae (maryrae45@yahoo.com), April 08, 2002

Answers

You are now poised on the threshold of either wondrous productivity, which is possible if u take the very first exclusive step of uninstalling and dumping Roxio, or suicidal cravings if u don't. That may be over the top but pretty much shows the abhorrence, in general, and to those with experience in this forum, to that paradigm of instability and cockiness that is Roxio Easy Coaster Creator. When and if u have done that and have digested even a small percentage of the entries in this forum, then we can proceed to more fruitful ideas. U, like all other CD-burning beginners, may initially wonder what the fuss is all about concerning Roxio. But as u get deeper into the mire u will wonder why no-one ever as much as hinted in the beginning that using Roxio is like taking a sledgehammer and hitting oneself with it. I'm not hinting; I'm all-out blatantly TELLING!

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), April 09, 2002.

There are some helpful docs on making VCDs at http://www.vcdhelp.com. I thoroughly agree with Mehmet that you should get rid of Roxio. I love Mehmet's posts because he doesn't beat around the bush, he tells you what you need to know and he's brutally honest. It's a LONG story, but as far as movies appearing to be longer than a CD-R will hold goes... CD-Rs have areas on the disc that are reserved for error correction and redundancy for CD-ROM format. The capacities you see on CD-R discs are for CD-ROM format. VCD and SVCD use a different file system format than CD-ROM and they don't make use of this error correction. This makes these areas of the disc available to store data. Hence, a 700 MB CD-R can store more data under VCD than is supposedly on the disc. You don't necessarily need to overburn and anyway, no versions of Roxio allow overburning, which is an excellent reason to get rid of it. Nero (http://www.ahead.de) is pretty easy to use to burn VCDs and it supports overburning.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), April 09, 2002.