Linux Multimedia Hacks

Create a VCD

Use the tovid scripts to automate the conversion of many video formats to VCD and SVCD.

Before DVD burners and media were relatively inexpensive, creating your own video DVDs was a daunting prospect. Many people (both professionally and personally) used VCDs (or Video CDs) instead, as the media and hardware were much cheaper. VCDs allow you to put a video on one or more CDs and watch them either in your computer or in VCD-compatible DVD players (most modern DVD players support VCD playback, if not SVCD playback). Even with DVD burners and media coming down in price, VCDs are still a popular format in a number of countries. This hack tells you how to convert your own video files into a VCD or SVCD.

Choose VCD or SVCD

There are a number of standards for video on CD. These standards include VCD, XVCD, SVCD, XSVCD, and others. Some of these formats aren’t even official standards (i.e., they may not even play in a commercial DVD player) but are instead variations on a standard. For the purposes of this hack, I will use the two more widely used formats—that will most likely work in your DVD player—VCD and SVCD.

The primary differences between VCD and SVCD, on a basic level, are video and audio quality and compression. The VCD standard was created based on MPEG1 video with CBR (constant bit rate) audio. The VCD 2.0 standard supports MPEG1 videos at a 352 x 240 resolution at 29.97 fps (NTSC) or 352 x 288 at 25 fps (PAL).

SVCD is based on MPEG2 video with VBR (variable bit rate) ...