Is it possible to use a CDR and Video capture board and compress the video with MPEG-2? Is there software that can compress video into MPEG-2 compression or is this only done by hardware encoders? If so how much video time can you get? Thanks Alot!

-- Dan chu (dchu01@utopia.poly.edu), October 06, 1998

Answers

It's not possible, as far as I know. VCD players can't deal with MPEG-2 compression, and DVD players aren't smart enough to recognize a CD with MPEG-2 compression.

Maybe when we get writable DVD drives....

-- Russil Wvong (rwvong@geocities.com), October 07, 1998.

I got an interesting follow-up by e-mail last week:

From: hamiltonm@cvnet.net

Well, apparently you can now.

"Some news on the introduction by Sonic Solutions of the first DVD/Super VideoCD player for the Chinese market (VideoCD is big over there). From Business Wire via Infoseek." This is from the DVDFile website... www.dvdfile.com/

Now, there was a link with the article, which I read when I initially saw the link a week or so ago, but it appears to be dead or broken now. You can find the above quote from the archived news at the DVDFile. Anyway, this player is supposedly capable of playing DVD's and VideoCD's encoded with, I think it said, variable bit-rate MPEG-2 data compression. But I doubt very much that would include a discrete multi-channel surround audio format such as Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1, which take up like 650mb's alone. Interesting none the less.

-- Russil Wvong (rwvong@geocities.com), December 13, 1998.

You can obtain mpeg-2 compression software at http://www.visiblelight.com/mpeg/resource/software/video/windows.htp I'm not sure how good it is or if it even works.

To answer your question, yes, mpeg-2 on vcd's is part of China's new Super Video CD standard (SVCD). There are several companies in California, including Sigma Designs and ESS Technologies, that are producing decoder chips for the new standard. Someone (I don't remember) is making a software decoder that would enable a P-II/233 with a CD-Rom to get video about halfway between VCD and DVD. Of course, the DVD camp is none too happy about this, and many predict that the SVCD standard will not make it out of China. I guess we'll just have to see...

-- Ben Smith (benjamin-smith@utulsa.edu), January 19, 1999.