Re: Re: making a vcd from an avi file

David D. Smith wrote:
>   Krovich> You have an avi file.  You would like to place the file
>   Krovich> onto a standard 700MBR CDR cd and place it into your DVD
>   Krovich> player and have it play.
> 
> transcode seems to do a wonderful job for this but it’s practically
> impossible to use from the command line. dvdrip is an old Perl GTK1.2
> interface to it that works really well but I wish there was a better
> interface to transcode than wrapping around the command and it could
> be properly integrated into a real app.

Transcode was one of the tools I used to do the conversion.  I was 
thinking about the need for a nice graphical utilility as well, perhaps 
I'll bring up some thoughts in a separate post.

For the curious here is the pipeline I used to take an avi file to vcd. 
  There are different kinds of avi files, but if you can play it on your 
linux box, then you should be able to convert it.

Assume you have a file named foo.avi.

Step 1:

Use transcode to convert the file to mpeg1video.

$ transcode -i foo.avi -x mplayer -y mpeg2enc,mp2enc -F 1 -Z 352x240 
--export_asr 2 -E 44100 -b 224 -o foo

This will create two files, one named foo.m1v and the other named 
foo.mpa.  foo.m1v contains video, and foo.mpa contains audio.  More on 
that in a second.  On the transcode command, note the -x mplayer option. 
  This is a neat feature of transcode in that you can call external 
programs to help you with the conversion.  In my test case, transcode 
itself couldn't read the avi file, but mplayer could.  So, I use mplayer 
to decode the video called externally via transcode.

Step 2:

Merge the audio and video files into a single file.

$ tcmplex -i foo.m1v -p foo.mpa -o foo.mpg -m v

When the process is done

Step 3:

Create Video CD bin/cue style cd images from the single mpeg file.

$ vcdimager foo.mpg

This will create two files, videocd.bin and videocd.cue.  Also note, if 
you have multiple mpeg files, you can specifiy them on the commandline 
and they will be made into the cd image.  For example, vcdimager foo.mpg 
  foo2.mpg foo3.mpg etc

Step 4:

Burn the cd image.

$ cdrdao write videocd.cue

Step 5:

Profit and watch your new videocd.