I'm trying panasonic 2.51 to create VCD and have some trouble with files taking a lot of space, about 10Mb/min. I've made a few tries and 10 sec of video take about 1714K in VCD format, but much less (about 1630K) in standard MPEG-1 system format with the same parameters (1150kb/sec video, 128kb/sec mono audio). Unfortunately tmpgenc won't even open one of my AVIs (2Gb caps), but playing with the merge&cut tool eventually gives a VCD file of about 1721K converting from one of the above files. At these rates, I can expect to store about 70 min on a VCD, maybe a bit less, is this right? Also, I'm trying to save some space (not much) by using mono audio at 128kb/sec, but have read that is not 100% standard. My VCDs seem to play fine on the PC and on a Philips DVD-711, however, any comment?

-- Alessandro Scotti (ascottix@netscape.net), March 08, 2001

Answers

In short, have a standard VCD NTSC format on one CD is pretty much like this:

Data Rate Video: 600 kbits/sec Data Rate Audio: 128 Kbits/sec Pel Aspect: NTSC/16:9 Color Tone Correction: TV (if available on your software)

Video Frame Size: 352/288 29.97 fps Audio Sampling Frequency: 44100 Hz

Good luck!

-- James Bond (jamesbond@007.com), June 15, 2001.