Creating VCDs

I've been faithfully compressing my edited video into MPEGs suitable for Standard VCDs. I've finally gotten around to trying to burn these onto CD and see what they do.

It's not quite as simple as just sticking the file into an ISO9660 image and going. I had to feed the MPEG file to vcdimager. That produced a CD image and a cue config file for cdrdao.

The CD played just fine in my cheap DVD player, and it looked good! It was about VHS quality, I would say. An attempt to burn a 12-minute video resulted in a shorter truncated video, so I'll have to look into that, but it's at least a start.

I now have a conventional way to distribute video that only requires a common and accessible consumer-grade DVD player. Yay, toys!...and Paige videos for the grandparents.