Something I've been toying with pretty much ever since I got a CD burner is making Video CDs, or VCDs. If you're not familiar with the format, just think of a DVD only a lot shorter and lower quality. Boy, with features like that how can you pass it up? *grin*

Well, the truth is they are actually useful. One thing I do is make VCD copies of my DVDs so I don't have to worry about the rug rat scratching or breaking them. I use a program named DVD::Rip for that. It handles all the fun stuff like shrinking down the DVD just the right amount to fit on one CD.

But I've also got a bunch of TV shows recorded on my computer and those are actually just the right size to fit on a CD. Actually, you can usually fit about an hour of TV quality video on one. Pretty cool, wouldn't you say? Well, I found an article that describes the process quite well.

The only note I would make is on the command used to convert from AVI to MPEG. The page says this:

transcode -i [filename] -V -y MPEG-2enc,mp2enc -F 4 -Z [480x480 or 480x576] -E 44100 -b [audio bitrate] -o [output]


But this is what worked for me:

transcode -i [filename] -V -y mpeg2enc,mp2enc -F 4 -Z [480x480 or 480x576] -E 44100 -b [audio bitrate] -o [output]