Video Help....

[Squinky]

Hey all, I've got a question for people that are good for this sort of thing.

I download anime (not porn) off the net and would like to put them on cd's to play on my dvd player....I thinkk they need to be converted to vcds or something like that so my question is, to all of you people that know how to do this sort of thing, can you school me real quick on how to do it and let me know what programs you use?

Thanks

[Esseb]

I'm going to bed now so don't have time to look around for you, but check out doom9.org. There should be at least one good guide there for your purpose. I'd recommend connecting your PC to your TV over spending dozens of CDs on one anime show, but that's just me.

If you plan on watching lots of anime on TV and the PC is too far away to connect to the TV easily, you could have a dedicated PC in the living room for just this purpose, but that tends to be expensive. A much cheaper alternative, which is what I did, is to buy an X-Box, mod it and put in a new hard disk drive. Coupled with X-Box Media Center you can upload movies/series to the X-Box over a LAN and watch them on your TV easily.

Someone may suggest you get a DVD player which can play DivX movies, but they're not really good. Most anime is encoded using Xvid anyway and use OGG for the audio which those players can't handle.

[LGM]

Well.. If your DVD player supports VCD and SVCD, you could try KVCD which stores 2 hours of almost DVD-quality movies on an 80-minute CD-R.

I'm about to sleep aswell, so.. GOOGLE FOR LINKAGE!

[RickJ]

Hey Squinky,

I used a program called "Ulead DVD Movie Factory 1.0."  a couple of years ago.  It took it a long time to convert from mpg to VCD or whatever it was.  Anyway I wrote the stuff to CD and got about an hour of stuff per disk.  I'm sure there are better programs around by now but if you want to know more about this one PM me. 

[TheYak]

First off, let me recommend a DVD Burner.Ã,  If you've got a decent burning suite, you'll save a lot of frustration and hassle.Ã,  If you don't, then you'll have some frustrations and hassles but at least end up with something decent-looking.
They've gotten cheap enough (A dual-layer (8Gig) Sony can be had for $100-150, other brands/off-brands even cheaper).Ã, 

If you're bound and determined to made video CDs, it's a learning process.Ã,  First off:
1) Your DVD-player must support them (check manual or website).
2) Even if they're supported, the support might be so shoddy that it'll reject homemade discs.Ã, 
3) DVD player (of course) must support whatever media.Ã,  Make sure it can read CD-R's, RW's or whatever you're using.Ã, 
I tried for weeks (with many CD's) to make a VCD my dvd-player would read.Ã,  Turns out, it was just a crappy player.Ã,  I tried it on others and they worked like a charm.Ã, 

A VCD is Mpeg-I, low-quality and a movie will span 1.5-2 discs.Ã,  An SVCD is Mpeg-II, has narrower support, and takes up significantly more space.Ã,  I haven't heard of KVCD but maybe something to look into.. seems like you might run into support issues though.Ã, 

With my first successful attempt, I used a program called TMPGenc (Easy to remember, right?) to convert the Div-X video to VCD format.Ã,  It has several tweaking options for video and audio that can iron out a few bumps and smooth out the picture.Ã,  I then used Nero Burning Rom (It had a VCD drop-down under CD-burning) to write it.Ã,  If you've got Nero Express, it should load, allow editing, convert and burn a VCD all in one program, but the quality may be lesser.Ã, 

With a VCD, the audio should be tolerable (assuming you're limited to TV speakers and not 5.1 or something), the video a touch blocky with some artifacts, but overall - quite watchable.Ã, 

I seriously recommend going the DVD route instead...Ã,  even when burning a movie to a 4.7Gig DVD-R, there's some audio/video degradation.Ã,  I've burnt many anime DVD's and they still take a bit of tweaking to get right (make sure subtitles aren't cut off, balancing quality more carefully for low-contrast scenes, etc.).

If you're determined, try http://www.afterdawn.com they've got a plethora of freeware utilities and numerous guides and step-by-step (albeit some over-involved) walkthroughs for DVD, VCD, SVCD, etc.

[Edit: For informational purposes, my initial DVD player was an Oritron (Wal-Mart stylin' $60), manual claimed S/VCD support . . . No.Ã,  My replacement Sony did it wonderfully.Ã,  Haven't tested the new Phillips yet for S/VCD. Also, I don't remember precisely but I'm thinking you can do as many video as audio minutes, i.e. 1 hour, 20 minutes on 700MB CD.. almost - but not quite - length of most movies.  Assume 3-4 standard show episodes]

[veryweirdguy]

Yes, I occasionally use VCDs and one problem is the size of a CD - I reckon you'd only be able to fit an hours worth of video on there. Not a problem if you're burning a TV series perhaps, but it can be a lot more frustrating with a movie, especially if you have you split your existing file into two parts.

That said, I use Nero, mainly because.....it came with my rewriter......

It handles the job well enough, allowing me to drag & drop most any type of video file into my playlist - it seems to convert them to a VCD format for me (I usually use .avi video files with various compressions and they never seem to have any hassle playing back).

As Yak says, you have to check your player is compatible (I only have access to one that is) and it would probably be better in the long run to use a DVD rewriter. But if you're willing to stay fairly low-quality, give it a shot.

Good luck, man!

[Squinky]

Oh hey, I should have mentioned that my dvd players are all compatable with these copys. I ussually only watch movies from the interenet on them, but I get them from other folks, and they don't have to change the format, they just download them in the right form and copy onto a disk or dvd.

Thanks everybody, I'll start messing around with this...