Which Dvd player will open movies on CD-R?

Discussion in 'DVD players' started by chuj666, Jun 17, 2004.

  1. chuj666

    chuj666 Member

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    I have a whole bunch of movies on cd-r which i use real player or windows media player to open, I don't want to change the format to VCD...can someone suggest what should i look for? ....and if the dvd opens formats such as cd-r and wma will it work?
     
  2. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    First off, you need to be specific about the video format of the movies. Many different formats can be stored on CD-R. The most common are MPEG-4 (Divx, Xvid, 3ivx, among others), SVCD, and VCD (which I assume you don't have since you said you don't want to convert to that). Different players can play different formats. Only a handful can play MPEG-4 because it requires completely different hardware to decode it, but since SVCD and VCD can both be decoded by the same hardware that's required for DVD playback they're much more common. VCD is probably the most common of the 2, but sometimes you can trick a player into playing an SVCD if it only supports VCD.

    Finally, you can put DVD files on a CD-R (although the bitrate is more limited and the max length is obviously limited by the size) and I think most newer players will handle it.

    Try searching the database at http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers to find a player compatible with the format you need to play.
     
  3. chuj666

    chuj666 Member

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    i have my files under mpeg format? but if the dvd supports CD-r format what does that mean?
     
  4. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    Okay, if it's an MPEG, it's probably either an SVCD or VCD file. If you just have the file, there are programs that can author either of those for you, but I don't know much beyond that since I only work with DVDs. Check the link I posted yesterday and you'll see that you can search for players that support those formats. If you look at the links on the left side of that page you can also find more information about each of those formats to give you a better understanding of what you're dealing with.

    As far as DVD files on a CD-R, it's just what it sounds like. If the DVD is small enough (and low enough bitrate) it can be played from a CD just like it would play from a DVD. The only catch is it's not part of the DVD standard and therefore isn't automatically supported by players. Some players won't even check for DVD files once they recognize a CD.

    Edit: It's also probably helpful to use distinct terms. CD-R and DVD aren't really formats. They're media types. The format is VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc,... It seems nitpicky but it may keep you from talking past someone who's trying to understand your problem. Go do some reading at Videohelp.com and hopefully it will make more sense to you. You can also check the Glossary page here at Afterdawn, but VideoHelp may help you understand a little better.
    _X_X_X_X_X_[small]Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
    Backup A DVD With DVD Rebuilder & CCE Basic: http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_rebuilder_tutorial.cfm[/small]
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2004
  5. tjfelt

    tjfelt Guest

    what program do i use to put DVDs on CD-rs
     
  6. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    You can burn them to CD with any program theoretically, but I recommend RecordNow Max (or whatever the latest version is called) because it automatically makes a DVD compliant file system any time there's a VIDEO_TS folder. That's not the big problem though. Besides needing to get it split into CD-R size pieces (which is easy with DVD Shrink), you also have to make sure the bitrate is low enough to play without stuttering or freezing. CDs have the 0s and 1s further apart than a DVD because they dont' fit as much data, so in order to have the same maximum bitrate they'd need to spin a lot faster than your player is capable of. That means you either have to try to guess how much to compress with a program like DVD Shrink (or another transcoder) and then check it with a program like bitrate viewer to find out the actual bitrate or re-encode so you can specify the bitrate and also resize to half D1 which should improve the quality on a TV. From my own experiences I'd say the highest bitrate you can use for miniDVD is between 4,500kbps and 5,000kpbs including audio.

    I suppose you could use DVD Rebuilder and CCE Basic for this if you used a helper program called RB-Opt which will tweak bitrates for you. Hmmm, I may have to try that to see how it comes out.
     

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