Hi Experts I am developing an application which captures live pictures in the form of an avi file. Now I want to make a VCD out of it. For that I encoded the avi to MPEG-1 system stream. Now this MPEG file is prefect as far as it is being played in the active movie control without any errors. But I think this MPEG is still not of WHITE BOOK Compliant VCD standards. I don't know about it. Can U please help me in two ways :: (1) What are WHITE BOOK standards for Simple MPEG-1 and for VCD. (2) I am using CEQUARDAT Video Pack 4.0 which creates the video cd with my mpeg-1 file without giving any error but when I play the .DAT file of the vcd created in the active movie control it generates an error "COULD NOT FIND ANY FILTER TO RENDER THE STREAM". Why is it so ?? When I use ADAPTEC Video CD Creator it says "Unsupported or Invalid Format". Can you please guide me in these two concepts. Hopefully waiting. Rahul

-- Rahul Saxena (bomber@ndf.vsnl.net.in), April 03, 2000

Answers

When you created the VCD I'm assuming you used the standard authoring of your VCD creating program. This makes a disc that is designed to be played by DVD/VCD software players or set top VCD boxes or in some cases VCD compatible DVD set top players. You need (in order to playback the VCD normally) some kind of DVD or VCD software installed on your PC.

Now you CAN get Windows media player to play it. But it won't work by simply double clicking on that *.dat file on the VCD disc. (which sounds like what you are trying to do) This is because of the file associations in windows. Windows doesn't know that it should use media player when opening a *.dat file. You "could" change those associations but that might make trouble for other programs that might be assigned to the *.dat file extension. But as I said, you CAN still get media player to play it anyway. You can do this by by-passing the file extension association like this. Start/open windows media player. Browse to the *.dat file on the VCD. Drag that file to the media player. Or open media player and then "open" the *.dat file from the files menu.

By the way. If you install a DVD/VCD player (like PowerDVD) the *.dat file extension will be automatically set for that software to play it back. THEN when you double click on the *.dat file on the VCD disc the PowerDVD player will open and play the file.

The other advantage to having a DVD/VCD software player installed is that then you will be able to run that VCD like it was intended. If you had the player software enabled, just loading the VCD into your CDROM drive would "autostart" the playlist on the VCD. If you had built the VCD with numbered menu selections it would also pop up a "remote control" pad where you could select clips from that menu.

HTH,

Rich A.

-- Rich (richa@home.com), April 03, 2000.

also if you open the windows media player and have it look in the mpegav folder and you see nothing, change the media box on the bottom from "all media files' to "all files' and this will show the dat files and play it too.

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), April 03, 2000.

No I am not double clicking the dat file made. I am opening media player or active movie control and then choosing .dat file from there. The error which comes in active movie is "NO COMBINATION OF FILTER COULD BE FOUND TO RENDER THE STREAM" and in media player "FAILED TO INITIALIZE MCI". See also the differnce in the two video cd creator packages.

Video pack 4.0 is making VCD withouth any errors from my mpeg-1 but the problem comes while playing

Adaptec is giving error at the time of making VCD layout saying UNSUPPORTED OR INVALID FORMAT.

Thanks

-- Rahul Saxena (bomber@ndf.vsnl.net.in), April 04, 2000.

I didn't quite understand your first post but maybe I do a little better now. Here's one thing that will cause a problem like you are having. Sometimes installing a certain type of sofware video player or anything involving video in multimedia can change a line in your system.ini that will cause problems like you are experiancing. This is especially true if you first installed something like EZCD creator and then install a second program from a different manufacturer. The following "might" fix your EZCD creator and allow it to accept the video again (and) might fix your Windows Media player problem.

You want to look at your SYSTEM.INI for a line that says "MpegVideo=mciqtz.drv". If you don't have that, then add it. If you have it saying "MpegVideo=MciCinem.drv" then that is causing your Adaptec software to choke on valid Mpeg files. You need to change the MciCinem.drv to mciqtz.drv

Please note, that if your Mpeg video is even slightly off in some timing parmeters, EZCD will not accept it. But some other VCD authoring programs might handle slightly out of time Mpeg and still burn the VCD. In that case you have a slight chance that it will not play back in some players.

But Windows Media player should play back the Mpeg (*.dat) file IF you drag it to the player while the player is on your desktop. Sometimes just "opening" it won't work if your file associations are messed up. Like I said, the Windows Media Player normally does not have any associations with *.dat files unless they have been modified by an installation of some other program using it. The only "sure" way to over-ride the file type assc. problem is to open Media player and then drag the file to it.

Change the "MciCinem.drv" to the windows default "mciqtz.drv" in your SYSTEM.INI Look in the SYSTEM.INI file for: MpegVideo=MciCinem.drv. That's the one you want to edit.

-- Rich (richa@home.com), April 09, 2000.

OK I have a demo version of the Rainbow program but when I try to convert an AVI file it tells me that the audio pcm must be uncompressed. How can I convert my compressed audio avi file to an uncompressed one that can then be comverted to a MPEG1

Thanks for any help

-- Tim Vistisen Baldwin (tim@x-tryk.dk), July 04, 2001.

go to http://www.mnsi.net/~jschlic1/ and download the avi2vcd converter. when you unzip it you find decompress.exe which will put your avi into the proper format

-- Jeff D (vvaterb0y_007@email.com), July 24, 2001.

that software is imposible to burn that format try psx recorder or nero burning rom software

-- eddie dixon (te2erd@yahoo.com), December 31, 2001.

avi 2 vcd was great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! try it out

-- sameek (rockinsam@rediffmail.com), May 15, 2002.

can someone help me? I'm in nero cd burning software, it says I can put avi files into it and it will burn to vcd or svcd and I installed the mpeg2 encoder already but it keeps saying "unsupported file format" what can I do? The nero rom software says it can burn avi to vcd but in this case, it wont let me. What's wrong?

-- Joyce (jokwong@ucdavis.edu), May 15, 2002.

I don"t know were you guys learned to make vcd/svcd"s but all the programs you have mentioned(Adaptec vcd/ez cd creator nero ect)for encodeing AVI to mpeg/vcd/svcd suck badly, the best encoders for vcd/svcd/dvd encodeing are Tmpgenc and CinemaCraft Encoder and for authoring the best (for me anyways)is the "ulead dvd plugin" cuz it does menu"s and chapters and titles.So if ayone need"s help makeing near DVD Quality vcd/svcd"s feel free to e-mail me cuz i have been doing this for a long time.....

-- Chris (mr_sevs@yahoo.ca), August 01, 2002.

After much searching and looking at the internet I finally found programs that allows my AVI file movie clips from my canon A40 digital camera to play in my VCD player. I have Ahead's Nero 5 Burning Rom and added Ahead's Nero MPEG 2 SVCD Encoder Plug-in in my computer. Pls. see http://www.nero.com for technical information. The plug-in allows the CD burner to make VCD, SVCD and audio CD etc to play in your DVD/VCD player. You just drag and drop the AVI files to the "New compilation window" and from the file menu choose write CD and that's it! There is no editing or adding music but it solves my problem. Thank you for this site it has been very useful. ....MVillena

-- marte c. villena (mcvillena@hotmail.com), November 14, 2002.

YOU SHOULD DOWNNLOAD AND ENCODER LIKE TMPGENC TO ENCODE THIS FILE BECAUSE I THING THAT THE FORMAT IS NOT GOOD YOU JUST HAVE TO ENCODE IT WITH TMPGENC.

-- VVJKIJF (vvj@hotmail.com), August 06, 2003.