recording vcd's

Recording a VCD is really piece of cake if you have all the MPEG-1 video clips ready. Just use some good CD burning tool, like Nero ( http://www.ahead.de/ ), and choose VideoCD as your format and drag'n'drop the MPEG-1 files into the layout.

If you _don't_ have MPEG-1 video clips ready, use TMPGEnc to encode your existing AVIs (or whatever) into VideoCD compatible MPEG-1 clips. You can download TMPGEnc from here:

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/specific.cfm/319

 

You're kinda right -- VideoCD has certain type of file structure, but you _can't_ create it by yourself by just creating directories to CD. Instead, you should use your CD writing software (Easy CD Creator, Nero, etc) and when asked which format you want to use, choose "VideoCD" -- this type can't have anything else except MPEG-1 files within it. Software then creates the disc layout and required extra files and directories for you and burns that into the cd.

You can fit appx. 700MB of MPEG-1 files into one VCD (depends on how many separate files you have), totalling 74minutes of video -- this is something you can't do by writing the files into data CD. Data CD even if it has all the same directories and similiar filenames as VCD, cannot be played with VCD/DVD player, because the physical structure of the disc is different. (just like you can't just burn .wav files into data cd and play that with your CD player -- instead you need to choose "audio cd" from your writing software).

 

Guide for VCD creation with Nero -- includes pictures, _should_ be pretty much idiot-proof:

http://vcdhelp.com/nero.htm