Super Video CDs
I've been messing around with SVCDs for the past few nights. An SVCD is to a DVD what an MP3 is to a CD: you scrunch a giant movie file down to a small movie file, and that makes it convenient to do more things with it, such as store it on your PC, put it on a CD that many standalone DVD players can play, etc.
The technology is interesting to me because it lets me encode our kid DVDs onto CD-R and put the originals in safekeeping. When Emily destroys them, no problem -- just burn another copy!
Important data points:
- Only about 40-45 minutes will fit on a 700MB CD-R. That means most movies take up 3 CDs. I suspect this is a fatal flaw for movie archiving, but it's perfect for kids videos, which are typically made for TV. Because an hour of TV is usually no more than 44 minutes of programming, they'll fit just fine on a single disc.
- DivX (which I understand is a deviant version of MPEG-4) can fit a whole movie on one CD-R, but very few standalone players can play it.
- DVDx is a very nice all-in-one ripper/encoder, but it couldn't produce working files for me when I tried to encode an NTSC 23.976 fps movie.
- CladDVD .NET is a nice ripper. That site also has a trial version of TMPGEnc, which is a good encoder with copy protection that is so inconvenient (it periodically rechecks the server to make sure your license key is still valid, presumably to discourage you from publishing your key) that I may choose not to buy it on principle.
- Encoding movies is slow, and error-prone. It wasn't until just this morning that I successfully produced a watchable SVCD -- the first 40 minutes of Starship Troopers. This was maybe my sixth or seventh try. The previous attempts failed because of dropped frames, poorly synced audio, dropped audio, low-quality encoding, or bad aspect ratio.
