Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 3/26/2007, 2:42 PM
I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. If the disc must play on a CD-ROM drive in a computer, and that CD-ROM only plays CDs, and not DVDs, then you must burn a VCD which Vegas can do directly. Alternatively, you can burn an SVCD, which is not as standard, but can provide higher video quality. Vegas cannot do this directly, but you can find out how to do it by searching on "SVCD" in this forum.

If that disc must also contain DVD quality material, you could create a miniDVD, but that may or may not play on the standalone DVD player. This format is basically a DVD formatted video put on a CD disc.

miniDVD

There are other combinations and permutations, depending on what your real goal is. As a suggestion, it is often better to describe your goal, rather then the presumed solution.

FrankLP* wrote on 3/26/2007, 6:18 PM
Great point John. The goal is to have the video on a disk that will play in a stand alone DVD player or a Computer CD-ROM Drive. I have been asked to put a corporate video together on a single disk that Physicians will be able to view on lap tops, DVD players at home, or on computers in their clinics. A sort of one-disk-does-all sorta thing.
Chienworks wrote on 3/26/2007, 7:11 PM
If you don't need a menu, one very simple thing to do is to burn an MPEG-1 file to a CD. This is about as universal as it gets. Most any semi-modern DVD player will show the file name on the screen and the viewer can play it with a single click of the remote control. In a computer, many Windows installations will offer to play it automatically when the disc is inserted. At worst the user would have to go to My Computer / Drive D (or whatever letter) and double click on the file. You could also include an auto-start file that would make the computer play it automatically.

MPEG-1 at 6Mbps looks pretty good, and you can fit about 15 minutes' worth on a CD.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/26/2007, 7:16 PM
Kelly,

VCD uses MPEG-1, but Kelly, are you saying that you can simply put a high-bitrate MPEG-1 on a CD without "authoring" that to the VCD spec, and a set-top player will play it? I didn't know that, if that's what you're saying.

As for universal playback, a VCD is a universal as it gets, I think. Pretty much anything that accepts round shiny objects and has video jacks in the back will play it (I guess there are some DVD players that don't accept VCD, but a few years ago, most all of them still accepted this older format). Quality is about the same as VHS.

All you have to do is create your project in Vegas, go to Tools -> Burn CD -> Video CD and it will render and burn your VCD. For the price of a blank CD, it's worth a try to see if it does what you want.


Chienworks wrote on 3/26/2007, 8:02 PM
John, most of the DVD players i've used can play almost any MPEG file at most any bitrate. Even scummy streaming MPEGs from the 'net!
johnmeyer wrote on 3/26/2007, 9:08 PM
Kelly,

OK, I just looked this up over at videohelp.com and apparently the feature you describe is called MPEGISO or DVD-MPEGISO. Just burn and play, with no authoring, much as some CD players play MP3 files. Only about 10% of the players in their database have been tested for this feature, but of those 10%, 72% will play the raw MPEG files.

Well, I guess I have to try this. I'm putting a bunch of "well-behaved" MPEG-1 files onto a DVD-RW ... it's done ... now to try it on three different DVD players ...

Nope ... batted 0 for 3. I used the UDF format when burning the disk. However, tow of my DVD players are more than two years old. The other one is exactly two years old. I assume this is a fairly modern feature and also that it would be more likely found on Apex and similar brands. Definitely something to look for in a future purchase.
FrankLP* wrote on 3/28/2007, 5:15 AM
Thanks guys. The MPEG1 sounded like a viable solution until the size limit came into play. This particular production runs 45 minutes, and I really need DVD quality.
I think I'll have to inform the client that DVD is the only way to go given the parameters we have to work with.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/28/2007, 8:36 AM
This particular production runs 45 minutes, and I really need DVD quality.

If you followed the exchange the Kelly and I had (above), the other alternative that might be available -- if the client can control which DVD players will be used -- would be to deliver on a DVD disc, but encode using DiVx. This would provide quality much closer to DVD (although obviously not quite as good, but far better than VCD). Based on several Divx downloads that my son recently did and which I transferred (by re-encoding) to DVD, the quality is pretty darn good. Since the downloads were less than 700K, if the DVD player could play those Divx files natively (as Kelly describes), then you'd be able to do what you want.
riredale wrote on 3/28/2007, 9:12 AM
I'm getting to this discussion late, but I think you're right in staying with DVD only. For one thing, the dual-format thing might have made sense 10 years ago, but now pretty much every device contains a DVD reader.

Besides, your target is physicians, and you can pretty much guarantee that ANYTHING they own contains a DVD reader. When I was first creating DVD-R disks of the children's choir 5 years ago, it was the doctors that had the playability issues. Why? Because they, as a group, were the first to purchase DVD players when they first were introduced (and extremely expensive) and those early machines just hated the then-novel concept of a "burnable" DVD.

One thing you might want to try--use one of the tiny DVD disks. Due to their size they are a novelty yet they work just fine on any player having a slide-out tray. They won't work with devices where you feed a disk through a slot. Another possible issue is capacity, which at 1.46GB is about a third of normal. Still, for a 45-minute DVD you would be encoding at about 4Mb/sec, which would probably be enough for video containing a lot of talking heads and VBR encoding.