is vcd dead, must i go dvd now

Help!

Firstly let me compliment you all on a truly great site (respects to Doom 9 also of course - hope thats allowed)
I have done my homework and read various guides and FAQs. Its blown me away Im afraid though

I am frustrated and perplexed. I am midscale pc aware and have been successfully creating my own mp1 vcds for many years. Sadly the VCD media has proved unreliable and starts to rot and become unplayable with time. This time can be as little as 3 months to as much as 2
years. So much for the industry hype. I do of course treat my collection with great care and store it in a benign domestic environment etc. I have used medium quality Princo but
they are not trustworthy. I suspect they maybe counterfeit products.. Several of my pals have suffered similar disasters with their music CDs.

Can anyone shed any up to date light on this problem


I have ventured naively into making and transferring old VCD material which I dont want to lose onto DVDs. I am told that this media is much more reliable and error correcting than the old VCDs TRUE??

It has come as a shock to me to discover how extremely tortuous the whole DVD business is even for my simple requirements
For example I simplistically thought you could just put 6 mpg1 VCD movies onto a DVD disc and play it in a set top DVD player NO WAY
In fact all my problems stem from trying to create reliable DVDs from exisitng VCD mpg1 movies to play on a standard domestic DVD player (I can usually play my DVDs on my pc by some means)

Not only am I sick of making coasters but also the enormous time thats wasted as well (and I cant use my pc for anything else during that time.

I am now faced with 50 or more tools to carry out various parts of the DVD process. Its mind boggling and so complex a technology for the layman.I suspect that much of these tools were developed 3 or 4 years ago when DVD creating was still a black art, and so many are now surplus to requirements (except the most esoteric users)

Can anyone suggest a modern one click app to create simple DVD5 copies of my old VCD movies and be sure they will play on my DVD player (which normally performs perfectly with commercial DVDs)

It appears that at least 50% of the problem lies in the quality and authenticity of the DVD media with the cheaper media being a complete NO NO (so we we havent advanced much further than the original VCD problem?)

As you can see I am floundering and daunted at being faced with 6 months or more of heavy obscure learning

Any pointers would be most welcome

 

Here is a good spot to start in
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/vcd_to_dvd-r.cfm
If you go to guides and search for vcd to dvd you will find lots more.

And yes as always media is a big thing. taiyo yuden and verbatim are the disc of choice.

bean55

 

Thanks Mr Bean

one of the biggest irks is that burning a DVD can tke 4 hours or more, in fact the complete authoring busines can waste a whole day. And you are still not sure it will play in your player till you actually try it.
WOW what a mess

by comparison the simple VCD can be done in a few minutes. Recoding is less than 1/2 hour and success rate is virtually 100%

The only downisde is unreliable media in the long term. The picture/sound quality difference is really only an issue for purists and barely noticeable on my simple CRT 19 inch tele

I shudder to think what blue ray will entail, an even greater horro story of paranoid copy protection?

I am beginning to think that burning VCD/DVDs is outmoded anyway because a 1000 gig HDD is now so cheap and will store 250 movies so you can have an array of these external drives which take up far less space than said movies

what do you think?

 

backing up to hard drive would be good as to keep the files not just for months but years, yeah dvdrs for the most part dont seem reliable, buy the best and it stands a better chance of playing months down the line...

which ever software you choose will result in quailty loss as its 2 changes from vcd to dvd if i remeber rightly...