We are a small collective in San Francisco making political video which we air first on public access. We produce some DVD's but we also encourage people to duplicate our stuff and pass it on (kind of like samizdat in Soviet Russia). Since DVD's are expensive and burners not that common, we also produce the best quality VCD's we can make from our DV masters using TMPGEnc for this purpose. No problem there.

We do have problems when people want to dup our VCD's but don't have a CD burning application we've used and know (We primarily use Nero, but are familiar with some of the others). So we're looking for a freeware application that will just copy a vcd to a blank cd that is easy to use for the naive and inexperienced, preferably one that can be set to make multiple copies for people who want to distribute our stuff and not just make a dup for a friend.

Then, we can include a short clip on how to use that app and the url for it on our VCD's which will make our life easier as well as theirs. The app needs to be freeware not shareware and simple. Ideally we'd like to find such an app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Any suggestions?

-- len harrison (len@lharrison.net), March 18, 2004

Answers

There really is nothing you can use. CDR-DAO is a free burning application that could be used, but it is not designed for the naive and inexperienced and in my opinion does not support as many burners as it claims. I would suggest you just tell people they are free to copy your VCDs and leave it to them to figure out how.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), March 18, 2004.

Cheetah CD Burner has a referral program. If you put a link to them on your web site, they will send you a free product code to register their CD burner. It takes a day or two, but is free, and is a full- featured registered version, not a demo.

http://www.cheetahburner.com/free.html

I haven't tried it to specifically copy a VCD, but it has copied every disk I've asked it to so far.

-- scott sibbald (sibbald@gol.com), August 11, 2004.