how does one go from VCD to avi

[pintree3]

It appears that all the posts are for the conversion from Avi to something else (or DVD to something else) and not the other way around. I wonder why this is?

The disadvantage in living in a country where the writing (Chinese in my case) is incomprehensible is that, with the exception of well known film titles, you at times buy movies with English written titles on the cover and then find yourself with a movie that is actually in an other language. Such is my case.

What I would like to do is copy these VCDs to my HD, add the english subtitles and then burn them back to CD.

I wrote VCD to avi because I am assuming that it is the best choice (And also because VCDs come in TWOs while one can burn back into one CD if it's in avi format.
I don't care which method is used. All I care about is the best overall quality. So what is the reccomendation (Software needed and method) in order to do so.
The simplest method may be to download the english version but that is NOT my way.

[Trahald]

This question is related to encoding to avi so moving to a avi(mpeg4) forum.

My bet would be using virtual dub (it takes mpeg1 directly) and use divx/xvid as the 'compressor' and use the built in filtering/resize if needed

[jggimi]

Doom9 has a step by step guide (http://www.doom9.org/mpg/vcd2divx.htm).

[LordRPI]

Might not be adviseable because of the aforementioned "it's coming from a source with already less quality than a DVD", but if you want to further reduce your size, you can give it a shot. Although, sometime I have found if the VCD source is poor to begin with, you'll get quite a substantial deterioraton of file quality, but I haven't tried this since DivX4.

[pintree3]

Thanks ye all ;-) and sorry for posting it the wrong forum.

The VCDs are of excellent quality, however there are no Mpeg files, like was mentioned. There are default folders: CDDA (empty), CDI with a .cdw file, .vcd file, .dyv file and .c8 file; There is an empty Karaoke folder, AN MPEGAV folder with .dat files, which according to their size are probably the video and sound files; an empty SEGMENT folder and a VCD folder with 4 very small .vcd files.
SO my guess is that I would have to work with the 2 .DAT files and probably the VCD files.
jggimi I will read the step by step guide.

thank you

[pintree3]

OK read the Step by step guide
Possibly the reason why i didn't find it on a search is because I am not interested in a conversion to Mpeg but to AVI.
Why avi? Because it takes less sapce and the quality appears to be better. Or am I wrong in either or both of these?
So going back to my original question, Are there dat (VCD) to Avi converters?

[iradic]

this link will get you started

http://www.vcdgear.com/faq.html

[stephanV]

Originally posted by pintree3
OK read the Step by step guide
Possibly the reason why i didn't find it on a search is because I am not interested in a conversion to Mpeg but to AVI.
Why avi? Because it takes less sapce and the quality appears to be better. Or am I wrong in either or both of these?
So going back to my original question, Are there dat (VCD) to Avi converters?

you cant just convert to AVI... AVI is just a container, you will have to choose a codec for audio and video. for video MPEG4 (DivX, XviD) flavours are popular, but there are others too (VP6 for example)

an avi file is not always smaller and of better quality than VCD. VCD is a specificly defined standard, which includes specifying the way video and audio should be encoded... AVI does not really do this (although it has limitations of course).

[jshumate]

The original poster is missing a very important point. Converting from VCD to AVI will NOT improve his quality! At best, repeat, AT BEST, there will be no change in quality. VCD and DivX are both based on lossy codecs. Converting from one lossy codec to another will not improve video and unless you are very careful, will probably make it worse. If the original poster wants to convert to DivX in the hopes of shrinking his file size and maintaining the same quality, that might be possible, but you can't really ever be better than the source (VCD in this case). If you really want to do this, download VCD Gear and extract the .DAT files from the MPEGAV directory and convert them to MPEG files. Then follow the suggested guides for converting MPEG-1 video to DivX. If the final output looks worse than what you started with, don't say you weren't warned.

[jggimi]

:goodpost:

And since the only purpose for .avi is editing -- I recommend HuffYUV as your codec. It's a lossless codec, and provides approximately 3:1 compression over uncompressed RGB images, but it will still require lots of disk space. Using that codec, you won't see losses converting from MPEG, but of course, you'll see them going back for VCD. At least this way, only one of the two steps is lossy.

Another option is frameserving, that may save some disk space but will complicate any steps even further, and while its an acceptable alternative, I can not recommend it; your processes will be complex enough as it is.

Pintree3, you will need to read up on processes for subtitling, you'll find guides and FAQs available on the website and in the forum, respectively.

And, you will also need to read up on creating VCDs from AVI, and the easiest way is probably to use the DVD2SVCD suite, which will "become" a tool called AVI2VCD when you set the input to AVI and the output to VCD. And yes, Doom9 has a guide. Though it speaks to SVCD rather than VCD, the process is very similar.