Some DVD Players will not play SVCD correctly but will play VCD perfectly, so if you've got an SVCD and unfortunately, one of these DVD players, then this guide is for you. This guide assumes that the SVCD is just one movie, and its on multiple CD's. If it's only on one CD, that's ok, this guide will work for that too, you just wont have to take some of the steps. The difference between SVCD and VCD is that SVCD is MPEG-2 and VCD is MPEG-1. Also, the resolution of SVCD is 480x480 for NTSC and 480x576 for PAL wheras the resolution for VCD is just 352x240 for NTSC and 352x288 for PAL. VCD also has to be CBR 1150kb/s. The audio will also have to be re-encoded even though it is probably VCD standard already. It has to be re-encoded because you cant trust TMPGEnc to come out with the same file length as the imput length, that however, is through no fault of its own. You can change NTSC to PAL or PAL to NTSC in this guide also but I do not recommend it, unless you want an annoying slight pause in playback, but if you need to make the conversion to be able to play the VCD then so be it. Remember a CD-R can hold just 80min's of VCD but since this guide is coming from CD's, then each CD if there is more than one will have less than 80 minutes of video anyway. Look below to see some information on what we will be doing and what you need.
Requirements
VCDEasy or VCDGear - VCDEasy will be used to burn or build images at the end of the guide, but also can be used to rip MPEG files from CDs. You can use VCDGear to rip the MPEG files if you wish.
SSRC - Little external Sampling Frequency Converter for TMPGEnc, produces higher quality than the internal converter
tooLame - Little external MP2 audio encoder for TMPGEnc, produces higher audio quality
m2v plug-in - Plug-in for the freeware TMPGEnc to read MPEG-2 files. If you are using the Plus version, then you shouldn't need this
TMPGEnc We will use this to encode.
The method we will take is as follows...
Rip from CD(s) --> Setup external encoders and m2v plug-in for TMPGEnc --> Extract audio and encode to VCD with TMPGEnc --> Burn or build image(s) with VCDEasy.
You will need a few GB space at least and hours of computer free time, depending on the speed of your computer. We will not be using any wizards with TMPGEnc, we will manually set the settings for VCD.
What are we doing first?
First we will be ripping the MPEG-2 files from your CD(s). When the SVCD was burned, the actual MPEG file on the CD was altered and now contains what are called Riff headers. TMPGEnc will not be able to read these headers properly so it's important to get real MPEG files.
