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Page overview

• Step 1: Have your MPEG-1 movie file(s) ready
  
• Step 2: The proper settings in Nero
  - The menu settings
  
• Step 3: Adding movie files
  - Correction on the menu
  
• Step 4: Burn that puppy

Step 1: Have the proper MPEG1 file ready

You will, naturally, need the movie file or files (you can put multiple movies or parts of movies on one VideoCD). The MPEG-1 should match the standard you want to target, ie. PAL or NTSC. Preferably use PAL since the resolution of a PAL movie is slightly better than that of a NTSC movie and most stand-alone players seem to be able to playback PAL and NTSC mixed anyway without any trouble.

Make sure you test this first with your DVD player!
In this test you can also see if your standalone player can handle CDR and/or CDRW discs. Some older DVD players cannot read CD-Recordables, instead try a CD-ReWritable disc since the laser reflection of these discs almost matches that of a regular DVD.

In short;

Make you choice now and remember the info of these tables above.

Note: Audiobitrate is not fixed to 224 kbps, however it is advisable to use this format. Lower bitrates take less space but quality is poor. Higher bitrates renders better sound quality but some DVD players might experience trouble with these VCD's ...

Tip: In case you the happy owner of a digital camera, like the Sony Cybershot 707, then you can use the recorder MPEG files directly to add to your VideoCD compilation. Just make sure you first copy the file to your harddisk since access to these files is faster.

Step 2: Proper settings in Nero

OK, now we have the movie file, we will start Nero.

Nero usually starts either with the Wizard window or with the "New compilation" window.

In case the wizard starts:
click the "Close Wizard" window so Nero will bring you to the "New Compilation" window.

In case neither windows appear:
either select "File" from the menu and choose "New..." or click the "New Compilation" button ().

In the "New Compilation" window we now select the "Video-CD" icon as shown here on the right, which will open the options for our new VideoCD. Note: For the rest of this tutorial I'm assuming you're about to make a PAL VideoCD. The only differences with an NTSC VideoCD is the option "NTSC" instead of "PAL" and the MPEG1 movie format used as mentioned above. Note: Click the tab "Video CD" if this is not the currently displayed tab.

For you're first VideoCD I'd like to suggest to use the settings as seen above. NTSC users might want to check NTSC instead of PAL.

Now go to the next tab, called "Menu".
Since we are about to create a VideoCD with menu's, please check the option "Enable menu".

The fields in more detail:

Tip: first you might want to check the "Preview first page" option. It shows a little window with a preview of the menu (changes are implemented right away!). This window is sizeable so you can see a bit more of the details.

Nero has 9 menu variants, which can be set at the "Layout" dropdown box:

Note:
You can also create a VideoCD without a menu, see "CDRW - VideoCD's with Nero" for details.

Click the tab "ISO".
Verify that only these options are checked (this is the default setting):

• ISO Level2 (Max. of 31 chars)
• ISO 9660
• Allow pathdepth of more than 8 directories
• Allow more than 255 characters in path

NO other option should be checked!

Now we go to the tab "Label".
In the field "Volume label" we can now enter the title of our VideoCD. Usually it's a straight forward name.

Tip: If a movie spans multiple VideoCDs I usually end the title with "_AOFB" where A equals the disc number in the sequence and B equals the number of discs in this set.

Note:
In the volume label, special characters like "/", "\" and a space are not allowed. It is common practice to use an underscore ("_") as a replacement of the space character.

Dates can optionally be set at the "Dates" tab.
I usually set the date here to "Use current date and time" for my personal reference, however the default setting will do just fine. Alternatively you can enter a specific date indicating for example that this is the movie of your holiday of June 2001.

At the "Misc" tab we do not need to set anything.

The "Burn" tab is not an issue right now either.

Finally click the "New" button.

Step 3: Adding files.

After we clicked the "New" button, this compilation windows will appear.

Use drag and drop to place a movie file (MPEG1, either with MPG or MPEG file extension) as shown below. Drag and drop can be used with the buildin explorer of Nero or using the Windows Explorer (by draging a file from the Windows Explorer to Nero).

Note: Other formats are supported as well - Nero will transcode/convert these files. Just ckeep in mind that the quality might be disappointing!

For those unfamiliar with drag and drop:
In the right pane you click through the discs of your computer as you would do with the Windows Explorer. When you finally found the file or files you want to add, use the left mouse button to select that particular file and keep the left mouse button pressed. Now move your mouse until is is positioned over the pane part pointed with the red arrow in the screenshot below. Once the mouse is at that position, you can release the mouse button and Nero will add the file.

You can add as many movieparts as you like. The order shown in the window pointed by the red arrow as seen in the screenshot above, will be the playback order of your movies. You can change the order using drag and drop within this little window.

When you dragged a illegal video file format to the track section, you will get an error message:

This error leaves us with three options:

• 1. Ignore it: Turn off standard compliance and continue
  
  Not advisable, but then again most DVD players seem to be able to handle VCD's that are not 100% VideoCD compliant.
  
• 2. Re-encode the video file
  
  Also not advisable.
  The buildin transcoder can convert the file (not the orginal one) to the proper VideoCD specifications. Yes even a DivX will be transcoded to MPEG-1.
  Warning: The QUALITY of this transcoded file might be rather poor!
  
• 3. Do not add this file: Cancel
  
  This is what I would do and use some tool to transcode it to the proper format.
  A proper tutorial on this subject will follow soon.

Note that the capacity of a CD is limited - the amount of space used is visable in the bar at the bottom of the Nero window, in this screenshot we used about 50 Mb's of movie data:

Tip:
A VideoCD can hold more data on a CD than a regular CDRom. This is due to the different level of error correction. A 80 minute CDR can hold app. 810 Mb of VideoCD data. So the indicators (the yellow and red dotted lines in the progress bar) are not indicating the proper capacity.

Corrections on the menu

Sometimes it can be usefull to do some corrections on the menu as it has been created by Nero. For example: to change the fact that a menu automatically continues to the next menu after 5 seconds.

In the window holding the tracks of your VideoCD, you will see both movies (for example here "Fiat127") and menu's ("Menu page 1" as seen below):

Click such an item with the right mouse button and select the option "Properties" from the popup menu.

• For menu pages;
  
  We can set the "pause" time before the menu continues to the next menu page. At "Pause after Track" one can choose "Infinite", where the menu does not continue to the next menu unless the user tells him to do so, or a specified number of "Seconds".

• With movies;
  
  We can set the "pause" time before the playback continues with the next movie. At "Pause after Track" one can choose "Infinite", where playback does not continue to the next movie unless the user tells him to do so, or a specified number of "Seconds".
  
  The tab "Menu" allows you to change the title and also the thumbnail image used for this item.

Step 4: Burning the VideoCD

OK, now we've made our compilation, it's time to burn that puppy.

Click the "Burn" icon () or click in the "File" menu, the option "Write CD ...".

The "New compilation" window appears again, this time showing the "Burn" tab.
Here you can choose to simulate and test the writing proces but if you have done this before I'd go for these options:

• "Write"
• "Finalize CD (No further writing possible!)"
• "Write Speed" set to maximum
• "Write method" set to "Disc-at-once" (not all CD-writers support this - in that case select "Track-at-once")
• "Number of copies" set to "1" unless you want more copies
• Activate "Burnproof" or "Exalink" if available (not all writers support this)

Finally click the "Write" button and wait for the CD to complete.

After the CD has been completely burned, you can try it on your PC using (for example) PowerDVD, or play it on your standalone DVD player to see if it all works.

Tip:
If you don't have PowerDVD, playback on your PC can also be handled by the Windows Media Player.
In order to do so, you will need to open the folder "MPEGAV" of the newly made VideoCD. Double click any of the files (default file is "AVSEQ01.DAT") and Windows will ask you what program it should use to open this file. Select the Windows Media player. You can also use drag and drop and drop the file on a opened Windows Media player.