vcd to dvd

[santner]

Anyone know any good software for converting a vcd into an avi file. More specifically, I copied the data from a VCD to my harddrive. The folder structure is this:

 

/cdi

/mpegav

/segment

/vcd

 

/cdi is empty

/mpegav contains avseq0?.dat where ? is 1-4

/segment contains item000?.dat where ? is 1-3

/vcd contains entries.vcd info.vcd lot.vcd and psd.vcd

 

I have not worked much with vcd's, I believe it is mpeg4 encoding? Anyway, I am sure that transcode would do the job, but I am not sure how. So advice on transcode would be great or advice on a gui application would be great as well.

 

The reason I am doing this is that I have some home video that I want to convert from vcd to dvd. Once I get the files in avi format, the rest is easy with dvd-homevideo from sourceforge.net.

 

Any help is of course greatly appreciated.

Edited February 27, 2005 by santner

[devries]

If I remember correctly the files on a VCD are avis. :). No need to transcode them. They should be in the /mpegav folder (anyway the videofiles are big so just look for big files). You can play these files with mplayer (and other players but perhaps you need for them work to rename the files to <file name>.avi)

[santner]

Unfortunately it is not that easy. VCD files are actually compressed using mpeg4 (I think) so I would need to decompress the files back to avi, then re-encode.

 

Any other ideas?

[devries]

I just checked (found an old VCD) and mplayer playes the .dat files in mpegav just fine.

[santner]

Thanks for the advice, but what I am looking for is a way to decode the vcd files back into avi files. I think that transcode can do this, but it is such a cryptic command line tool that it would save me a lot of time if someone has already done it.

[Cannonfodder]

You might want to check out virtualdub

 

http://www.virtualdub.org/

 

Not sure if it will do it, but its designed to allow you to load a movie in one format and recompress it in another..

[devries]

Avi is just a container (a video file + audio file) :). You can't transcode to avi. And you won't get the files any smaller (or you will have to accept quality loss).

[papaschtroumpf]

as devries said, just play the dat file and it should play fine.

VCDs are actually mpg encoded, not mpg4.

[santner]

First, a little background. When I first got my dv camcorder, I made vcd's. Some time later I realized that I could make dvd's with some effort, and have higher quality videos. So my motivation is that my first 20 some videos were vcd's that were aging and the rest of my home videos are now dvd's. Anyway, these vcds are very important and so I wanted to convert them to dvd. Here is how I did it.

 

Unfortunately, I had to use some windows tools. Probably could have found similar tools in linux, but I was in a time crunch.

 

1.) Convert the .dat files on the vcd to mpeg files with VCDGear (Windows)

2.) Demux the mpeg files using dvd-lab Pro 30 day trial edition (Windows) and then resample the audio from 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz (DVD Compatible)

3.) mplex the files back together (Linux) - this is the command I used:

mplex -r 10000 -f 8 -S 4400 test.mpv test.mpa -o test.vob

4.) Use dvd-menu to create the menu for the dvd (Linux)

5.) Use dvdauthor to create the dvd filestructure (Linux)

6.) Burn the files to dvd (Linux) - this is the command I used:

growisofs -speed=8 -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video /path/to/VIDEOTS_and_AUDIOTS_directories

 

I hope this is useful to someone else. And if you want to create dvd's staight from your home dv camcorder, then check out my software:

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvd-homevideo/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/dvd-homevideo/

 

:D :D :D