Re: DVD to VCD?
Originally posted by videonastie
Is there anyway I can convert a DVD into a VCD & burn onto a normal CD?
Toast has burned a 1 GB file to VCD for me and the resulting file was around 45 MB. I wasn't too happy with the quality but I guess it would do in a pinch.
As mentioned above there are a few programs that will rip a DVD for you, another is OSeX.
Also can I isolate the movie to fit on a 4.7GB DVD disc?
If your intention is to rip a commercial DVD, let's say "Spider-Man", and burn it to your own DVD-R you could have trouble.
For one thing, commercial DVD movies are usually a dual-layer disc (DVD-Rs are single layer). That means that generally less than 1/2 way through the movie the laser picks up a signal to refocus to the second layer and start traveling in the opposite direction (ie back in toward the center of the DVD). The problem is this: The layer break is encoded into the MPEG stream. If you rip the DVD, recompress to a smaller file size and burn, the layer break is still there. I don't know what would happen, maybe nothing, maybe it will stop playing at that point.
I suppose you could rip and then de-mux the file, find the layer break and remove it, mux again, recompress and burn. Honestly, that sounds like way too much work just to get a free copy of the movie, plus, it might not work anyway.
By the way, you will notice a slight pause at the layer break in quite a few movies. Smarter encoders will try to place the layer break in the middle of a scene transition when the screen is black anyway and you won't notice the pause, but I've seen it many times.