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I've gone up and down the threads and followed all the guides that i can get my hands on and nothing has really worked for what i want or atleast w/o major compromise...
My goal is to rip a dvd or home video and make my own fully interactive vcd including audio in the menu.
This was my method for making a vcd. It is a hell of a process but it makes room for improvement ;)
software used:
DVD Shrink v3.2
Alcohol 120% v1.9.2
SmartRipper v2.41
DVD2AVI v1.76
TMPGEnc v2.524.63.181
VCDEasy v2.0.2(commercial version)
The DVD i backed up is the Animatrix. I figured this would be a good start since it's only 8 episodes and i didn't want to encode an entire movie since there'd probably be alot of trial and error on my first interactive vcd.
I used DVD Shrink to reauthor my dvd and cliped out all the credits at the end, saving valuable encoding time. These were all saved as ISOs and loaded into my Alcohol 120% virtual drive. The indiviual episodes were loaded as nesessary.
I followed afterdawn's guide for DVD to VCD to the T, so i'll skip the particulars. Basicly SmartRipper rips the DVD into VOBs or in my case a VOB. DVD2AVI frameserves(.d2v) and demuxes(.wav). TMPGEnc makes my vcd compliant mpg. Yatta yatta yatta.
This is the fun part. I've used nero before and the menus are next to crap when it comes to aesthetics, so after some searching, i found VCDEasy. There was a sweet guide on the home site for VCDEasy and i kind of adapted it to my liking. Like i said earlier, i wanted an audio menu. VCDEasy has a feature where you can import a picture and convert it to an mpeg where it can be used as a still in the vcd you create. I adapted this by painstaking means.
I figured i could use my still mpeg and add some music from the DVD to it using TMPGEnc. Not as easy as it sounds in my case. I had to reauthor a portion of the DVD useing DVD Shrink and and follow all the steps above to demux and collect my .wav. From there I used a audio editing software and cliped it down to size. THEN... use the clipped .wav and match it to the still mpeg using TMPGEnc. This is just for an audio menu!
From there it was just a matter of tweaking the interactive menu in VCDEasy to make my still .mpg(w/ audio) to play infinitely until the "play" button was pressed on a remote or somthing. You can check out some other guide for that, it's not that complicated.
Save the project as a bin/cue and finally burn in Alcohol 120%'s image burner.
And here are the questions i have...
These are all short episiodes, all not being more than 10 min, so in total about 70-80min worth of viewing pleasure. In all my efforts, i could not get the size of the mpgs to drop by a KB. I figured if the size of the inital image of the DVD dropped, then the mpeg thereafter would too... Nope. I used DVD Shrink on one episode and shrank around a 200meg image to a 150. No change in mpeg size. Next up the Audio...
The audio was a pretty good chunk too, so going w/ the same line of thinking, i took the wav from the demux and converted it to mp2(the only other format that TMPGEnc excepts other than wav that i know of) using BeSweet. I turned a 95MB wav into a 9MB mp2 with near perfect quality. But guess what... not even a KB of change in the final mpeg.
I lost hope of putting all the episodes into one vcd after this. It was a travesty, but it had to be burnt on two seperate cds.
I was thinking of converting the DVD into and avi and burn the avi onto a vcd... but i don't know if that'd work. I've looked at kvcds, but they say quality is unbearable. What i'm asking is a series of questions.
Is there a more efficiate way of doing what i'm doing?
Can i make an actual interactive menu that'll highlight options i've created and have audio also?
Is there a way to compress a DVD so i can get the whole movie or lots of clips into one vcd?
Thank you for reading all of this and sorry it took so long to get to the point.
Texas loves you,
-Toxic Fish
..::Brought to you by the fine people at T-Fish inc::..
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