Trouble making VCD that plays

[sportmomk]

I am trying to burn a very small project onto a Sony CD-R for a friend who does not have a DVD player. My project consists of a short videowave slideshow and 3 very short videos from a digital camera. When I make the project in MyDVD Premiere 8 as a VCD and burn it to the CD, I cannot open any of the folders it burns onto the disk. When I open the disc in My Computer, I see the following folders: CDI, Karaoke, Segment, EXT, MPEGAV, and VCD. Some of these folders are empty, some have files that nothing can open (e.g. Windows Media player, RealPlayer, Quicktime, etc.)

Am I doing something wrong? I know quality isn't as good on a CD, but that's OK. I just can't make the project work at all on the CD.

 

I have burned the same files to DVD and it plays fine.

 

Thanks for any advice.

[gi7omy]

Does the disc play on the computer?

 

If not, then try creating the VCD as an image file first and check its size, then try opening with Disc Copier.

 

It's possible what is happening is the completed output is too big for the CD and is being truncated

[sportmomk]

It doesn't play on computer either - just a bunch of folders appear as stated above. The whole project is only 52.4 MB going on a CD-R that holds 700 MB.

[gi7omy]

Forget the project size - video stuff is rated on time duration. For example, a 4.3 GB DVD will only hold one hour of video at good quality, even tho the original DivX file may have been a mere 600 odd MB

 

Try making an image file to the hard drive first and see what size that is

[james_hardin]

Something else to try:

 

A VCD will not <I>auto play</I> on a PC unless it has been associated with a program like Windows Media Player.

 

To play it, navigate WMP to the MPEGAV directory on the CD and Open the MUSICO1.DAT file there. You will probably have to set the file mask to All Files (*.*) in order to see the .DAT file.

[sportmomk]

I burned an disc image as recommended. It shows the file size as 44.9 MB.

 

I tried to open every file in every folder on the burned disc with WMP as recommended above - same message for each one: "WMP cannot open this file".

 

I guess I don't understand why Roxio is burning the project as all these folders on CD. I don't see folders when I burn DVDs. When I simply went to My Documents/My Videos where the files are stored and simply used the built in "Copy all items to CD"

function in Windows XP, the movies do burn to the CD. The only problem with this method is I can't get the Videowave slideshow on this way as it is stored in Roxio. Also with this method the short videos from the digital camera don't play well - stuttering replay, but they do play. I don't put the disc in and get a bunch of folders on the desktop like when burned with Roxio. The videos just start playing with WMP.

 

I guess it will be easier to buy my friend a DVD player

[gi7omy]

OK - media player won't open an image file - think of that as a 'zip' file if you like - what you do with that is either mount it in a virtual drive or open it with disc copier - it will then write the contents to the CD. Don't just copy the image over - that still won't work.

 

I actually got a CD like that at one time a lot of years ago when I was a Power Quest beta tester - they used to send the betas on a CD but, in this case, someone had just burnt the image. Luckily enough back then, I did have a CD writer and ECD 3.5 so I was able to make a proper CD from that

[james_hardin]

I burned an disc image as recommended. It shows the file size as 44.9 MB.

 

I tried to open every file in every folder on the burned disc with WMP as recommended above - same message for each one: "WMP cannot open this file".

 

I guess I don't understand why Roxio is burning the project as all these folders on CD. I don't see folders when I burn DVDs. When I simply went to My Documents/My Videos where the files are stored and simply used the built in "Copy all items to CD"

function in Windows XP, the movies do burn to the CD. The only problem with this method is I can't get the Videowave slideshow on this way as it is stored in Roxio. Also with this method the short videos from the digital camera don't play well - stuttering replay, but they do play. I don't put the disc in and get a bunch of folders on the desktop like when burned with Roxio. The videos just start playing with WMP.

 

I guess it will be easier to buy my friend a DVD player

The folders are there because in order for a VCD to meet international standards, they must be there! Just like a DVD will have an empty AUDIO_TS folder. Many Players will spit out the DVD unless that empty folder is present.

 

If you are using XP burning to make the disc I would be surprised if it ever works! It is not designed to produce compliant VCD.