I had my home (8mm) movies converted to a Video CD. I'd like to be able to use Windows Movie Maker to make the video a little more creative. Is there a way to convert the video cd into a format that I can import into the movie maker?

I don't know much about video cds, but the file that gets played when I put it into the dvd drive is calledmusic01.dat and is in a folder called MPEGAV.

Thanks.

-- Bill Quill (quill1968@aol.com), November 13, 2003

Answers

I know nothing about Windows Movie Maker, but maybe some of this information can help you figure out what to do. http://www.vcdhelp.com has information on converting between different video formats. VCD is MPEG-1 video at a constant bit rate of 1.115 Mbps and a constant audio bit rate of 224 Kbps. The MPEGAV directory contains the file(s) that are played on the VCD. .dat files are simply a type of MPEG-1 video with certain header information specific to the VCD format. If you do a web search and find the program VCDgear, you can use it to convert the .dat file back to .mpg (MPEG-1). I'm not sure what you want to do, but you should be aware that VCD format is pretty low quality to begin with because of the low bit rate and converting it to other video formats will never improve the quality. Depending on what you convert it to, it may make it worse.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), November 14, 2003.