A VCD is designed to be played on a standalone DVD player. As p_l stated you need to find the correct file to play on your computer. If you only want to play the videos on a computer, you don't need to make a VCD. Just burn the MPEG file to a CD. Then anyone can load that in their computer to play. (note: by burning the MPEG file only, this will not play on a DVD player).

Dave T2

Yes, I tried to play the disc on a standard DVD player that states it plays VCDs. No luck. I also tried to drop the AVSEQ file into WMPlayer icon, but "no combination of filters could render the stream." I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but don't have the skills to see what it is. Thanks for any help.

When you say in your original post that "the burn process doesn't happen," perhaps it is an indication that your burn didn't complete due to a buffer underrun error or other burning error. That might explain your playback problems. What speed are you burning at? I find that to avoid those types of burning errors, 4x is my usual max, and I'm even safer at 2x. Try it again starting at 2x and see if this might help in your case.

Are you burning this within VF or with something else like VCDEasy?

If your using another program you wouldn't happen to be trying to burn the edit file would you? (with the extention .vf and a yellow icon with a black V) That would explain the small file size, and the burners sudden stop, and the error message from Window Media Player. This file is just a listing of all your editing work to tell Video Factory how to playback/render the untouched raw footage.

When you burn a VCD from within VF it deletes the rendered file after its made the CD. I would recommend you burn an MPG to disk first and then go through the VCD process and choose the "use an existing file" option from the render settings window.

From the options menu in VF choose preferences and click on the CD tab and set the write speed at 1x until you've managed to make one that works. After that you can experiment with higher speeds to see how fast your system can handle things.

And actually I would recommend rendering an MPG file to your computer and use something like VCDEasy(freeware, I think) to burn. help with that is at vcdhelp.com

And like its been mentioned if you just want to archive your work on CD to play on your computer, you can just burn a typical ROM using any burn program. The only advantage to a VCD is playback on some DVDs, and being able (with the right software) to burn above a CD's capacity (at the sacrifice of error checking - which should be of concern to someone looking to archive)

The best way to archive would be to render an AVI file and send it to a digital camcorder tape. The tape will last long enough(assuming you leave it alone) until DVD-Rs come down to a sane price. VCD simply doesn't compare to DV when it comes to quality (though you may not always see it on a small screen)

Still hope you figure out your VCD options.