Akmal Ali Khan Safi

Making Your Own VCD Movies

Making VCD movies and playing them on your stand-alone DVD-player without a DVD-burner!

VCD means "Video compact disk". It is a very economical way of making movies of your own which are playable on almost any stand-alone dvd-player. A VCD is an ordinary CD containing moving pictures and multimedia effects like menus, chapters and high quality sound.

VCD is far from being something new. It came on the market in 1993 when some major multi-tech giants like Sony and Philips, along with some other companies, took the initiative. But the result was disappointing since the technology contained some undefined defects and did not gain ground either in Europe or in the USA.

Southeast Asia, on the contrary, became a home for VCD marketing. Some years after its release, VCD was not even known in most western countries, but in Asia computer users used it on quite a large scale. Today in most South Asian countries VHS (an ordinary video cassette) is being replaced by VCD.

Making VCD movies has many economical and practical advantages that make it quite popular now in Europe and the USA. You could burn a whole 74 - minute movie on a single 650MB CD along with synchronized sound. The video quality is not very good and can be compared with ordinary VHS movies. The sound quality on the other hand is much better than that a VHS movie can produce.

VCD movies usually have a screen resolution of 352x288. While playing back on a TV screen the movie is shown on a full screen. In my own experience the video on a VCD is much better than that on VHS in less hectic scenes. Scenes that contain too many moving objects can, however, decrease the quality of video in a VCD.

The format, which is used to compress the video and the audio in a VCD, is called "MPEG-1". This is a digital format, which is used to compress the movie without affecting the video quality badly.

MPEG-2 is another compression format, which is used to create DVD movies. By comparison it should be mentioned that DVD has a screen resolution of 720x576, almost double that of VCD, and the quality is excellent.

The downside is that a DVD can take 4 to 8 times as much space as a VCD. Moreover, it is not certain that the DVD you have created can be played back on your stand-alone DVD player since most of the players don't support CDs that contain files created on a DVD (mpeg-2) format.

One thing is important to note is that, like all other formats, the quality of a VCD you have created depends very much upon the video quality of the original or the source file. A VCD movie can be played on your computer as well, but you probably wouldn't like it since the quality is even worse on a computer.

In order to make a VCD from a file, it has to be of the VCD standard. It means that you must first convert your file to mpeg format and then create a VCD from the file. This standard is called Video CD or White Book and is too extensive a topic to describe here.

Don't worry about it, though, since there are many free video-editing programs like TMPEnc, Panasonic mpeg encoder, etc., that will do the job for you smoothly. After making an mpeg file it is then ready to be burned to a VCD.

Different encoders support different formats. One of the encoders that I use is TMGEnc. It is one of the simplest video editing programs and can convert a whole bunch of different formats which include the most popular video formats like DIVX, ASF, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, AVI, MOV etc. The best part is that it is completely freeware and you could download the latest version at the TMPGEnc website.

Since creating VCDs doesn't require too much knowledge about computer stuff, it is now becoming very popular among regular Internet surfers. To my mind, the easiest way to give it a try is to create a VCD from a file, which is supported by your video editing program.

To get an mpeg clip of your favorite movie or a song, you need to download one of those file-sharing programs and then search for the desired clip. Most of the media files on those programs are already in a format that is supported by the video editing programs like TMPGEnc.

There are many file-sharing programs on the net like Napster, KaZaa, Limewire, Bearshare, etc., but some of them have such unstable connections, that I don't think they are even worth downloading. I recommend KaZaa; it is a very suitable program for getting video clips in mpeg format, and besides, the connection is quite stable.

Well, after you have downloaded a file in any of the supported formats, you are ready to begin encoding it to a VCD format, which is playable on your stand-alone DVD player. In my next article I will describe the whole process, step by step, in simple and comprehensive language.

So don't forget to check out this site after you have everything needed in hand... e.g. a video editing program (TEMPEnc recommended), a file in any of the supported formats (like mov, divx, mpeg-1, mpeg-2, wmv, asf, avi) and of course a CD burner!