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The Complete Amateur's Guide To Burnin' VCDs
12/21/01
by Remy Davison
Welcome to yet another installment in the 'Complete Amateurs' series. This time,
we're looking at how to make VCDs: how to cook 'em, roast 'em, toast 'em and eat
'em. Let's go.
Why Would I Want To Do This?
Because you can't afford a QuickSilver G4 with DVD-R? Seriously, VideoCD (VCD)
is the poor (wo)man's answer to DVD-Video. For relatively little money, you can make
your own videos that you can watch on your Power/iBook and distribute on CDs.
Most VCDs burnt onto CDR will play on any home DVD player. Yes, you read that
correctly. Any domestic DVD player made in the last couple of years will play VCDs.
Older DVD players may require you burn onto CDRW, but the price difference
isn't great.
The bonus with VideoCD is that you can give them to anyone with any PC. VCDs are
burnt in ISO format, which means they're essentially PC-formatted discs.
For presentations, school projects or simply archival back-up of important video
material, VCD on good-quality (gold if you can find them) CDRs will last a lot longer
than those tapes which will gradually disintegrate. Also, VCDs can be copied very
quickly and easily.
What Computers Can Play VCDs?
Any Power Mac with a CD/DVD ROM drive and QuickTime 3.0 or later (with the MPEG
Extension - okay, maybe version 2.5) will do the job. Really old CD-ROMs (2x or 1x)
may not work. But any PowerBook or iBook with an internal CD-ROM can play
them. No DVD-ROM required!
68K Macs - only Macs with MPEG decoder cards can do this (or a PPC upgrade
obviously). The Quadra/Performa/LC630 series, for instance could have an MPEG card
bundled with it, or it can be added.
I have no idea about PCs, but most people seem to recommend a 200MHz Pentium or thereabouts
for playback.
What Do I Need?
- A spare 604e Mac minimum. Don't bother with a 6100/60. Humans simply don't live
that long. You need a Mac that you can take off-line for hours at a time. Now's the
time to snap up one of those cheap and plentiful Power Mac 7300 or 7600s. They're
dirt cheap right now. A 180MHz version is about the minimum. 7600s are good because
they come with AV (video in/out capabilities). An 8500 or 8600 would also be good.
PowerBooks/iBooks hooked up to a FireWire-connected DV cam, or to a VCR via a PCMCIA
or USB capture device also does the job.
- Say 5 gigs of disk space for high-compression videos. This means video captured
and compressed used M-JPEG A or MJEG-B. This is quite acceptable quality for working
with analog video, say, from a VHS VCR. You'll need 14 gigs per hour of video, roughly,
if you're working with Digital Video (DV) source material.
- A video capture card. Even some Performa/Power Mac 5xxx models had these. Capture
cards, like the AV Quadra (some say the Quadra 840AV was the best Mac video workstation
ever), AV 8100s and AV 7600s, allow you to capture video from a VHS, Betamax or S-VHS
camera or VCR. Frame rate limitations notwithstanding, an AV Centris or Quadra will
do at a pinch or
- A FireWire or FireWire bridge connection to a DV camera.
- Toast 5.0 (for instance).
- A CD burner.
- A lot of patience.
This needn't cost a lot. Put it this way: if you have a Mac which can take a video
capture card (most of them), a 4GB hard drive and a CDRW, you have all you need to
make VCDs.
Plus, of course, the raw footage of your rendition of American Beauty III.
Whadda You Use?
A PowerBook G3/233 (I have an embarrassment of PowerBooks), an iRez Capsure PCMCIA
capture card, a 40GB FireWire hard drive and my good old VHS and Betamax VCRs. A
now-ancient Yamaha 6416S does the toastin'.
So How Long Does it Take?
Depends on what you're encoding with. If you're using a moderately-powered G3
(say, 266MHz), count on an encode taking about 15 times what the real-time length
of the video is. I'm compressing a 17-minute video on a G3 right now and it'll take
about 3.5 hours. That's why I said you need a Mac you can take off-line and devote
to encoding VCDs.
Raw footage has to be compressed into MPEG-1 before you can fit it onto a CD and
burn it. It's compressed so that it'll fit onto a 74 or 80-minute CD. That means
up to around 700MB. Of course, your raw DV footage might be 14GB, but you can still
get this down to under 80 minutes using MPEG-1. Think of it like MP3 compressing
songs at a 10:1 ratio.
This compression stuff is hard on a CPU and requires lots of horsepower. If you're
fortunate enough to own a G4, particularly a dual-processor model, the process won't
be quick, but it'll be a lot faster. Software like Cleaner (see below) is optimized
for the G4's AltiVec instruction set and the G4 is just a fast CPU anyway.
Why Can't I Do This in Real Time?
Sure you can. But the PCI card you need for real-time MPEG encoding costs $3,000.
Time is money - but not that much money.
VCD Players
There are millions of them. Virtually any player that's QuickTime-aware can play
MPEG-1 (VideoCD). Here's a short list:
- QuickTime (Apple, free; QuickTime
Pro, $29.99).
- MacVCD (shareware, $10)
- FreeVCD (Communityware)
- SimpleVCD (shareware, $10)
- iRez Reel-Eyes ($39.99; comes free with iRez's
Capsure PCMCIA (no longer available) and Capsure USB.
- Strata VideoShop (commercial; there are also
freeware versions)
- Apple Final Cut Pro (commercial,
$999; $299 for upgrade).
- Adobe Premiere (commercial, $599)
- BTV View/BTV Edit (shareware, $20)
- Cleaner (commercial, $499;
Cleaner EZ is bundled with Final Cut Pro)
- Seagull Video Player
(shareware, $20)
- VCD
Player (shareware, $10)
What Should I Capture Video With?
This isn't a video capturing tutorial, so I won't go into this; for an intro,
read The Complete Amateur's
Guide to Pro Video on the PowerBook. I wrote this myself, so I mostly agree with
it.
Here's a hint: if you're not using FireWire DV, use S-video connectors where possible
- composite (RCA) is lossy.
What's Hot?
QuickTime will play VCDs scaled to 'fill screen', which doesn't mean full screen.
Telling QuickTime to 'present movie' means it'll only play to whatever it's scaled
to.
SimpleVCD and FreeVCD play a VCD upon insertion of the CD-ROM, but offer little in
the way of user control. I've found SimpleVCD buggy (but that just may be my system).
MacVCD is the best, IMHO. You can toggle between full screen and normal size and
you can quickly fast forward/rewind or click to a particular part of the video, much
as QuickTime can.
VideoCD Burning Software
- Toast 4.x or Toast 5x (Roxio, commercial)
- CharisMac Discribe 4x (commercial and 5
free trialware, CharisMac Engineering)
- B's Recorder Pro/NeroMax for Mac (NeroSoft, commercial)
- iDiscWriter (commercial, no longer available)
What should I burn with?
Probably Toast 5.0. Why? It comes with VCD MPEG-1 encoding support built in.
Plus it's the de facto standard on the Mac.
Toast 4.x is a bit more complicated. Sure, it can make VCDs competently, but unlike
Toast 5, it cannot MPEG a QuickTime file. Rather, it relies on a third-party application,
such as Astarte's M.Pack, to build a Toast-ready MPEG stream. QuickTime Pro will
also do this, but see the section below on "Which software does the best-quality
MPEG encoding?"
CharisMac's Discribe 4.5 or later is less costly, but you'll need an MPEGger (see
below) to actually turn your QuickTime file into a VCD-compliant MPEG-1 stream. You'll
find Discribe bundled with Sony burners mostly.
B's Recorder (or NeroMax for Mac) will sometimes accept lousy MPEGs which Toast won't
accept for burning. Probably they're a bit corrupt, or you're pirating a file extracted
from a commercial VCD. It's available in Japanese and English.
iDiscWriter I have no experience with, but having read the (l-o-n-g) manual, it's
a full-featured VCD maker. Good luck finding it though (out of print).
MPEG-1 Export/Compression Software
- QuickTime Pro (version 4 or 5)
- iMovie 1.x (Apple, free, no longer available?)
- iMovie 2.x (Apple, bundled with Mac purchase; $49.99 commercial).
- Toast 5.x
- Astarte M-Pack v.3.x (commercial, no longer available?)
- MPEG Power Professional
(commercial, $249-$999)
- B's Recorder Pro/NeroMax for Mac
- iDiscWriter
- Movie2MPEG (freeware)
- iRez ReelEyes
- Cleaner
- VCDGear (freeware)
I evalute some of these below. MPEG Power Professional, which I don't have (review
copy please guys), costs between
$250 and $999 depending on the version and has just been updated to version 2.5.
This is claimed to be the fastest software encoder out there, although I can't speak
from experience. It also allows you build a single VCD out of several videos. But
you can do a quick cut and paste job in QuickTime if you want to do this from several
clips. ReelEyes will do this too.
It won't be Professional, but we're Complete Amateurs.
MPEG-1 Editors
This baby is the only Mac tool I know of which will do a genuine edit of an MPEG
file. And do it quickly. iDiscWriter and various others, such as bbDEMUX
1.2.1 will only de-mux an MPEG stream (i.e., separate the file into audio and
video streams). If you find you've MPEGged a file that's too big for a CD (more than
74 or 80 minutes), JAW can split into smaller chunks. Don't be fooled by the name
- JAW splits MPEG-1 as well as MPEG-2 files. It also lets you manually set how many
chunks and what size they should be. It's quick and dirty, but it works.
QuickTime 4.x (not 5.x) looks like it will edit MPEG. And it will cut the
movie time. However, it will not reduce the size of the file, which means
you still can't burn onto CD if the total file size exceeds 80 minutes total.
MPEGSplit, which comes with that old Mac MPEG freeware Sparkle, again only demuxes
a stream. It doesn't edit it. iDiscWriter reportedly came with a tool called MPEGEdit,
but I have no experience of it, and don't know whether it demuxes or edits. Reading
the manual, it looks like it might actually edit MPEG. But no web searches turned
up MPEGEdit (for Mac) anywhere.
Like QuickTime, ReelEyes, looks like its editing MPEG. But you'll have to export
or save it. Saving it flattens it as a QuickTime movie, which makes the MPEG unacceptable
to Toast for burning.
Cleaner will let you edit MPEG files, but then has to re-export it - which
can take hours.
If you try and do more than 80 minutes worth on one CD, you can drop your file on
Toast. Toast will think about it for a while and then tell you that you haven't got
enough room. Time to use JAW.
Play safe: try and make around 78-79 minutes the maximum for an 80-minute
CD. Toast needs a few extra MB for a few other small files it makes on the VCD.
Bottom line: if you have too much footage in MPEG, JAW is the only workaround. The
trick is to edit your raw footage so you don't have to re-MPEG it.
Which software does the best-quality MPEG encoding?
I've tested four packages: Toast Titanium 5.0; Cleaner 5.0x, Astarte's M.Pack
3.5 and QuickTime Pro 5.0x. Of these, Cleaner unquestionably delivers the best quality
and the most features (and so it damn well should, it costs $500). Cleaner's output
is crisp and clear and probably 99% of the original. Even using its 'fast' (lower-quality)
setting, it clearly out-performs Toast, M.Pack and QuickTime's VCD export quality.
Cleaner allows you to brighten/darken, control contrast and blacks/whites, to fix
up any excessive color or dinginess in the raw video footage. It can also let you
export to RealPlayer, Windows Media and so on, but that's another story. What we're
interested in is its ability to export MPEG-1 in NTSC or PAL format.
Cleaner will also preserve the original size of the footage. If, say, you captured
at 640x480, Cleaner won't reduce it to 352x288 (unless you tell it to). Other MPEGgers
will crop or scale almost by default, leading to fuzzy or grainy playback in full-screen
mode.
The second-best output is delivered by Toast 5.0, which is a slow but competent MPEG-1
encoder. And it's free with Toast Titanium. But it's a long way behind Cleaner's
media quality. For good-quality DV footage, you won't notice as much lossiness, but
with analog VHS for instance, the limitations of the source tape, combined with MPEG-1's
compression schemes, mean fairly ordinary quality.
Trailing the field are M-Pack and QuickTime Pro. M-Pack produces 'tracking lines'
(I don't know the technical term), like mouse tracks on a passive-matrix LCD, even
when the footage is DV. Not good. On the plus side, it's probably the fastest encoder.
QuickTime Pro's MPEG-1 (Toast VCD) export is, in a word, crappola. Not only does
QT hog the CPU on non-multiprocessing machines, but it delivers very poor quality
with analog material. The output is grainy and blurred and I wouldn't use it. Using
other codecs, such as Sorenson Video, it's fine, but MPEG-1 is not QuickTime's forte.
And it's slow.
I haven't tested iMovie's ToastVCD export plug-in, but assume the same quality as
Toast provides, as Roxio provide the plug-in
Bottom line: If you can't afford Cleaner, use Toast as it delivers adequate quality
- and you need it to burn CDs with anyway.
Burnin' VCDs
OK. We got our raw footage MPEG encoded. Now what? Burn, baby, burn, of course.
Click down Toast's 'Other' button and choose 'VideoCD'. Then drop an MPEG on it.
Of course, if you used Toast in the first place, the MPEG's already there, waiting
to be burnt.
Now you can name it. Don't just let all your VCDs get labelled 'VIDEO_CD'. Remember
now, it's a stupid PC ISO naming convention, so you'll have to call it MY_AWESOME_VIDEO_MAN
Click 'Record' in Toast. If the MPEG is much less time than the CD can hold, it'll
ask whether you want to 'Write Session' or 'Write Disc'. If you hate wasting CD space
(as el cheapos like me do), choose 'Write Session'. But note that this will probably
not play on a PC or DVD player, only on your Mac. Choosing 'Write Disc' means
it will work.
Do I need to keep the MPEG file I made to make copies?
Not really. Toast's CD 'Copy' function will make another VCD for you, whether
you wrote a session or the disc. You can also save the CD as an Apple Disc Copy or
Aladdin ShrinkWrap image, or as a Toast image.
Done? Good. You now have an ISO-compliant VCD you can play on any DVD player or
virtually any computer. Cool.
This is insane. It takes hours and delivers lower-quality video
Okay. Go buy a new QuickSilver with a nice DVD-R drive and iDVD. Apple will make
you very welcome at their store, particularly if you're paying in cash.
Okay, I'm hooked: where can I find out more?
Here. VCD Help is rather Windows-oriented,
but still lots of info and some reference to using Toast on Mac. Also check out MovieMac. A swag of useful resources and answers
to FAQs.
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