Attached is a statement from the afterdawn glossary
"Basically miniDVD is a regular CD that has the same structure as regular DVD-Video has. Most of the standalone DVD players can be fooled to think that the disc inserted is a regular DVD-Video disc and to play it."
Can anyone please explain to me how this can be done or where to gain further information. I've tried searching the forum but to no avail. There was a reference to a web site but it was in German which I cannot understand...thanks in advance
If you look at the structure of a normal DVD, you simply find a few directories, and files placed in these. The Files are things like the actual video, the menu structure, etc... but essentially these are just files on a disk.
So the mini DVD idea is just to put the same files/structure on a CD. Of course the CD can only hold ~700MB data, so this limtis the amount of video that can be out on the CD.
Since most modern Standalone players just look for the file structure, etc and determine what type of disc (VCD/DVD/SVCD/MP3/AUDIO) you are trying to play, and get on with the job, ignoring the actual medium the files are on (CDR/CDRW/DVD/DVDR/DVDRW). Unfortunately some players look at the medium type, so if they see a CD, they know that they only can play VCD/SVCD/AUDIO from a CD and so will not play a mini DVD.
I think www.vcdhelper.com should give some more info.
You can't. If the discs works on a PC sofware player, and doesn't work on your standalone player, it means that the player identifies the disc as a CD, and won't play it as a DVD.
As far as I see, Demon understood your question perfectly.
What I know is that some of the cheaper standalone players do play miniDVD, my sister in-law has one that plays the miniDVD I created. Its just that in the Afterdawn glossary where it explains miniDVD, theres a sentence which states that some dvd players can be fooled to play miniDVD. Hence, I thought the dvd players can be tricked into playing miniDVD (via software / plugins etc.), similar to tricking a dvd player to play SVCD by changing the header to VCD.
Unfortunately, there is no 'software' as such that will produce a miniDVD that will work on all DVD players, the fact DVD players use a great deal of software means they are all different, and behave differently.
You could try for instance creating a VCD or SVCD, if your palyer handles these, and then encoding the MPEG object files at higher bitrates, etc, since some players will decode much more then the SVCD standard calls for..
THere are a few things like this you could try to see what the dvd player will handle... but there are no hard and fast rules I am afraid...
