Hi Ho All,

I have a couple of questions. Like several of you, I am attempting to put JPG pictures on a VCD so I can view them on my TV with my DVD Player. My burning software is Nero 5.5.9. I am just a beginner at this. I am curently using a trail verson of VideoMach 2.6.3. What I have done is placed all the files in and set the input and output frame rates and duration. Not really sure how all that works. Anyway, after the burn, I can play it in my DVD player but the pictures zip by at a blinding speed and in reallity I only see on picture on the screen. What I would like to do is advance through the pictures and would also like to have some sound (recored voice clips or music attached to the pictures or complete show).

1. What JPG converter would be best; VideoMach, TMGeng,xatshow ?

2. What frame rate should I use. VideoMach shows diferent rates but I do not know which to use (I have a NTSC system). For NTSC it has several choices but what is the difference. I just want to fill up the screen with retaining the aspect ratio of my pictures.

3. What is the sequence of events with JPG, AVI, and MPEG?

4. Do I need to convert my JPGs to AVI or can I convert them directly to MPEG. Guess I am just confused on the whole matter.

Any help would be appreciated.

Tx,

JJP

-- Joel Prouty (proutyj@chrma.hqusareur.army.mil), August 15, 2002

Answers

If you have Nero then why not use that for creating your picture VCDs? If u r not aware, Nero can very well do this. I don't know about VideoMach but u shouldn't have to use that.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), August 17, 2002.

Tx Mehmet, I stumbled on to that after submitting my question. Only problem is that I can not seem to "pause" the pictures on my DVD player. I have the frame duration set for 5 seconds. Also the interactive menu only works on the first frame of menus. After that all I can do is play from the begining of the set of photos. Another draw back is that even though I put over 400 photos on the cd, I am only able to see the "limited" number of photos (99) on the menu.

What I really wanted was to add recorded voice naritive to each photo but does not seem to be a way with Nero (I am using 5.5.9). Can you answer any of these questions or the others I asked in my initial email?

Tx,

JJP

-- Joel Prouty (proutyj@chrma.hqusareur.army.mil), August 19, 2002.

To manually advance pictures on a so-made VCD the pause should be set to infinite. That means the player is waiting for you to press NEXT when a picture is on display. Putting any value in pause will necessarily disable any control you may intend to exert as to the frequency of picture change. White Book numbers SEGMENT directory items as up to itemxxxx.dat, which implies we can put up to 10000 pictures on a VCD(!). But there a few things that limit this number to a few hundred. Depending on the picture resolution (352x240/288 or 704x480/576) and quality, each still MPEG can range in size from 100K to 500KB (Nero fixes it to 345KB or so for the higher-res version). Then menu items are only up to 99 (not Nero's fault, but White Book's limitation). If you really want to access the >99 pictures on your VCD you have to forego the menu. Lastly, Nero doesn't support putting sound with a still MPEG VCD. This is duly covered by White Book, though, and if important to you then try other programs like xatshow (www.xat.com) or the free (but a bit kvetchy) VCDEasy. Just bear in mind: if there is a soundtrack (you include your favorite *.wav file during creation; this gets converted to CDDA and included in the CDDA directory later as you can peruse during inspection of your finished VCD--sorry it's not converted to MP3 to save space or whatever, re MP3 freaks) then this automatically means the length of time each picture is displayed is the total *.wav file length divided by the number of pictures. NO CONTROL is left to you, meaning you can't pause the pictures while audio goes on, etc. If picture is paused the audio stops, and needless to say NEXT and PREV are irrelevant. If you want to use NEXT and PREV (infinite pause), THEN you ARE NOT allowed to put in a sound file. There are NO menus with xatshow, but there are with VCDEasy, subject to the limitations in White Book.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), August 19, 2002.