Akmal Ali Khan Safi

Burning Your VCD Movie On a CD Use a free downloadable tool to burn your movie onto a CD.

• April 3, 2002 •

This article is the third and the last part of the series on creating a VCD movie and burning it on a CD-R disk. In the first two articles I tried to shed a little light upon the background of VCD and described the process of converting your movie to VCD format. In this article I will assume that you have at least gone through the previous article published here at Infinisource.com on 26th Feb 2002.

If you haven't done this, I recommend you go through both articles before reading the following tutorial, just to make sure you understand what you are creating. This article will just describe the last part of VCD creation, e.g. burning your mpeg-2 clip on a CD-R or CD-RW disk.

In order to be able to burn your VCD clip on a CD you need to have a burning program, which supports VCD burning. There are different programs like DVDeo, VCDEasy, Nero etc. which you could download and use for a limited period.

I recommend Nero burning rom, as it is a very simple-to-use program and lets you make changes in creating menu for your VCD clips. You can download a demo version of Nero from the Nero Website, which you can use for a month. so go ahead and download the program and install it.

Burning Your Movie

After you have downloaded and installed the program, click the program icon to start it. The following window will show up:

In the left side you can see the scrollbar. Scroll down and click video-cd and you should now see a window like the one below:

Don't change anything yet and click "New" on the right top of the window and it will now show you the main page where you could add your clips for burning. The following window is what it should look like:

As you can see, the media files are on the right side of the window. If Nero doesn't show your media files by default, you can browse and find where you have saved them. All you have to do now is to drag and drop the files you intend to burn on a CD. See above!

Depending on the file size, it will take different lengths of time to drag and drop the file. If it is a BIG movie you are moving then it will take a couple of minutes at most. If you receive an error message telling you that the file is not in the standard VCD format then you have made some mistakes while encoding the file. You have to re-encode the file and then burn it. See my previous article!

After you have dragged and dropped all the files, go to "File" and click "Write CD…." The following window will pop up:

The only one thing you need to change under "Video CD" is the choice between PAL and NTSC. If you live in the USA or Japan choose NTSC otherwise choose PAL. Under "Menu" you can make your own changes for how your VCD layout will look like when you insert it in your DVD-player. Under "Label" you can give your CD a name and the rest you can ignore. When you are done with your changes click "Write" on the top right of the window. You should see a window like the one below:

This is the last step and all you have to do now is to sit back and wait. Don't start other programs while the burning process is in progress to make sure it is done without errors, particularly if you have an older PC with a processor under 450 MHz.

That's it! Depending on the size of the VCD you are creating, it will take some time for the burning process to finish. A CD burner with 4x speed will take between 15-18 minutes to burn a whole CD (650 -700 MB). After the burning process is finished you will get a message from Nero and you can then close the program, take out your CD, which contains your first VCD movie, and watch it on your BIG TV screen.

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Akmal Ali Khan Safi
Music Editor
InfiniSource.com

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First article VCD series

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