On Mar 5, 2006, at 11:09 PM, LuAnn Johnson wrote: > It sounds like in order to burn a VCD or SVCD I will have to have > Toast or something comparable. I wanted to check the price of VCDs > and SVCDs to see if it would be worth my time to purchase Toast, > but I couldn't find any prices for them on-line. Where can I find > them?
You burn VCDs onto standard CD-R disks. The two main formats are VCD and SVCD, with SVCD being near DVD quality. The VCD format is older and uses MPEG-1 video. SVCDs use MPEG-2 video, just like DVDs. You can get 30-45 minutes of video on one standard CD-R, depending on the resolution you want. There are other programs that can burn VCDs and SVCDs, and even some free ones: Mirith [1] makes software for doing just VCD and SVCD. It's probably the easiest way to go because it has all the tools in one bundle. I used it for a while in demo mode and would have bought it, if Toast had not built the SVCD mode into an upgrade. It's a nice package. There's a pile of free software that lets you do it. Check out this guide [2]. Most of the free stuff has been ported over from Linux and is pretty confusing to sort out. I used to make VCDs on Linux before my Mac had a burner, and it was much harder than using Toast, but worked just as well in the end. [1] <http://www.mireth.com/pub/mac-svcd-bdl.html> [2] <http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be March 28 at Pitt Academy, 6010 Preston Highway. | The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
