First off, a brief overview of my hardware/software: Starmax 3000/200 Macintosh clone with G3 upgrade. Turbo TV tuner card, BTV Pro for viewing/recording ,OS 8.6, Toast Titanium 5.0.2, Lacie external SCSI 16X10X40 CD-RW. I have managed to capture from my tv tuner card using btv pro, a 3 minute music video with video settings at- Compression:Video, Color: Best, Frame Rate: 29.97, and window size is 352 X 240. Sound settings are at- Stereo, 16 Bit, 44100 Khz. When the movie gets captured, it ends up as a quicktime movie approximately 300 Mbs in size. I can play it back no problem, and it looks and sounds great. Then I launch Adaptec Toast Titanium, and select VCD, then I drag and drop the movie file onto toast, and it converts the movie to mpeg1 ready for vcd burning. Once the conversion is done, I am left with two movie files on my drive, the original, and an .mpg version which is about 1/10 the size of the original. After I burned my vcd, I played it back in my dvd player. The result: Video quality looks great with smooth frame transition, the sound is great for about one minute, then....GONE! It just stops dead as the video continues to the end. I went back to my .mpg on the computer, and played it from quicktime and it did the same thing hence the reason for the bad vcd. Anyone have any idea why the sound would stop even though the original .mov file plays just fine? I figured if I just let Toast do it's magic, it would convert everything just right without my intervention. Maybe I need to assist it somewhat? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

-- Mike Vdk (graboids@csolve.net), April 03, 2002

Answers

I don't use a Mac but if I were u I will capture another music video clip and proceed with that to see if the problem is with the captured files to begin with. Not because the captured files AVI, or in your case MOV, play okay means nothing is wrong with them. Some MPEG encoders stop encoding when they detect corrupt portions of the stream that may not be evident on playing back the source file. More sophisticated encoders correct the glitch and proceed encoding. TMPGenc may or may not do this but since it is Wintel, u can't try.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), April 06, 2002.

Under Mac OS, you can also try to use "Media Cleaner" to encode your VCD.

-- Frederic (frederic@eltw.nec.com.tw), April 08, 2002.