I have a Canon digital (still) camera that records avi movies at 320x240 at 15fps. Can I turn these into (S)VCD format to share with my family to play on DVD (region free) players? Thanks. p.s. will the quality be really bad?

-- Aaron K. (egorest@hotmail.com), March 13, 2003

Answers

You can convert these to VCD, although I would not recommend converting to SVCD as the final result will be awful. 320x240 is pretty close to 352x240 NTSC VCD, but having to convert to 480x480 NTSC SVCD will not be good. Various tools such as TMPGenc (http://www.tmpgenc.net) can do this conversion. The final result will be OK. I have a VCD where I did exactly what you propose and it turned out OK. Not great quality, but it was as good as some commercial VCDs I have and it was definitely watchable. Whether your family can watch it or depends on whether their DVD players support NTSC VCD on CD-R media. Most do, but there are some that don't.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), March 14, 2003.

Thanks. A helpful response.

-- Aaron K (egorest@hotmail.com), March 20, 2003.