Juju

I'm a huge fan of a certain British sci-fi series. Unfortunately the Beeb made the mistake of not sharing it with the rest of the world. Luckily, it's pretty easy to get ahold of the episodes the day after it airs. (or several weeks before) So I wanted to burn them to VCD. Now in the past, I've found doing this to be a major pain. In Linux I'd occasionaly get lucky enough to make it fit on one CD, but half the time the quality would be horrible or I'd screw up the aspect ratio. And forget about trying to do it in Windows. I'm a cheap bastard and all the free Windows programs are a a mess. Since I've switched and got a mac mini, I was hoping OSX would have some magical ability to do it with one click. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. I would have thought you could just drag them into iMovie or iDVD or something, but they don't seem to support .avi files However, after a little searching, I've found a reasonably simple way to do it with 3 free programs that consistantly result in high quality video at the proper aspect ratio. It even lets me make a nifty custom menu screen.

So I figured I'd write down the steps required so I don't forget...

Step 1 ffmpegX:

ffmpegX relies on two seperate files that you have to download. They tell you to download them to your desktop and then select the path to them. It's pretty ugly. After you select the files, you click an install button and I thought it would install onto my system and I could then delete the files off the desktop. Well that's not the case. It asks for the path to those files everytime it seems. So save them somewhere you want to keep them permenantly. Like under the Applications or Library folder somewhere. Drag the .avi into left side (Source Format). Under Target format, select SVCD mpeg2enc from the drop down. Click Encode. This takes quite a long time... like several hours on my little mini, but I was doing other things while it runs in the background. I never tried SVCD ffmpeg, wonder if that would be faster. This creates several files, the audio track in a .mp2 file, just the video in an .m2v file, and an .mpg with both the audio and video combined. I didn't mess with any of the other settings, it might be possible to skip the .mp2 and .m2v.

Step 2 VCD Builder:

Use the Menu and 1 Sequence Template. Click Create. Drag a menu picture on the left side (I used the logo and added episode number and name in photoshop). Drag the .mpg created by ffmpegX into the right side. Click Project Settings. Give it a title and select BIN/CUE Files for Output.

Step 3 MissingMediaBurner:

Insert blank CD, when it asks you what program to open the blank disk in, just click ignore. Select the cd burner in the first drop down at the top. Select generic-mmc in the second drop down. Click the video button. Select Burn Multitrack CD-ROM XA - cue or toc from the middle drop down. Change the write speed to whatever it is you have. (the mini is 24x). Check the Oberburn Disk option. I suppose if I had played with the quality settings in ffmegX, I could get them to fit without overburn, but it takes so long to encode. I was happy to find that even 75 meg over it would still work. Drag the .cue file created by VCD Builder into the Files box. Click Start.

Step 4 PROFIT!:

Enjoy your British sci-fi goodness.

I've only tried playing these in my old Apex DVD player. Some DVD players may not like it. For instance, my XBOX refuses to play them. Then again I have no idea if the XBOX even supports SVCDs.