Adventures in the Land of the CD-Rs and VideoCDs!
11:41
Last night I had a Bright Idea. I took Star Wreck videos (parts 4½ to 5) and ran them through FlasKMPEG, producing VideoCD-compliant MPEG clips that I can burn on a VCD and play them on a DVD player.
Too bad I forgot to take one of them to my "parallel encoding" effort, and one encoder accidentally brutally produced a MPEG-2 file.
I'm now finishing the encoding of two last files. In the end of the week I'll be able to demonstrate some people that Finnish independent movie scene is far from death. =)
Annoying stuff:
- To burn VCDs in Windows, I would need Easy CD Creator 5.
- I have ECDC 4.
- Roxio says it would be acceptable to download an upgrade IF I'd have registered my copy.
- Sure, I'm willing to register to get the upgrade.
- "So, may I see your CD serial number?"
- "Where it might be?", I ask.
- "Why, printed on the packaging!"
- Was the number printed anywhere? Did the program ask it during the installation? I think not.
Back to Linux to mess with vcdimager and cdrdao once I finish this conversion, I guess...
(BTW, this MSIE Google toolbar is pretty neat. Would it be too hard to write this one in XUL or something? I think not?)
14:21
Niiiiice. The files take up 749 megabytes. It's possible to write approximately 730-something megabytes on a 700-megabyte CD-R if you try really hard. I'm not going to leave out any of the features and the trailer, so the SW5 bloopers must be left out (and it will fit on a regular 650-meg CD-R).
I think I have once again seen the cruel face of the CD-Rs: Either the data you try to fit on them is much less than the maximum capacity (less than half full), or just a bit too much.
Make no mistake: Murphy was an optimist.
16:09
...so the damn thing was burned eventually. The final image size turned out to be 665 megabytes. Slight overburning, but at least my player seems to play the last tracks just fine.
22:31
The VCD seemed otherwise pretty nice, except the sound in part 4½ was somewhat choppy. (Apparently FlasKMPEG had problem with converting mono sound to stereo.) Otherwise, sound and picture quality was high enough.
No menus - or even track lists - were displayed. Not nice. Any idea how those could be made in Linux?
02:35
Messed around with VCDImager 0.7 (tried to generate menus, but the damn thing choked on my menu MPEG segments...), submitted information for Rukajärven Tie movie DVD (which I bought today) to iMDB...
Rukovodstvo opazdivaet'.