Digital Dilemmas

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2004

 

Picture a valley. You’re on one side, and you want – need – to get to the other side.

 

But the only way to get from point A to point B is to jump. The gap between the two peaks seems manageable, but as you look down in the valley, you see people thrashing about, holding for dear life onto what look like radios, cameras, and VCRs – all analog, of course.

 

As the prospective leapers line up on your side of the valley, getting ready to jump, you spy over onto the other side – and it looks like they’re having some sort of party! There are balloons, free pizza, and occasional cries of joy coming from small groups of people thronging in front of video screens, looking at the little stock numbers race by. Once in awhile, one of them shouts out something that sounds like “IPO!”

 

Your head is spinning; you’re not ready for this brave new world! It’s not worth it, you say; why not just stay here, in the safe, analog world?

 

So you start to turn back. But as you move away from the edge of the valley, you realize that everyone is going in the opposite direction – some being dragged, kicking and screaming. You can’t go back; there’s a monster there, they tell you, the monster of Obsolescence, which will render you nothing more than an irrelevant blip.

 

Sounds like the opening of a scary book, right? Well, if you think the book on moving from the analog to the digital world is scary, wait until you see the movie! Or rather, wait until you hear about the movie I tried to make with my cool digital equipment and my computer!

 

I wanted to review a very nice little program I dug up called VCDEasy (http://www.vcdeasy.org/), which lets you take any digital media file – audio, clips, pictures or video – and prepare a Video CD (VCD) – a format that can be played on most DVD players. It’s a nice, easy to use program, but the really nice part of it is that it lets you record your VCD on a regular CD writer! While relatively few people have DVD recorders on their computers, most newer computers come with CD writers, and quite few people use them to record audio CDs and MP3s for computers or even automobile MP3 players (just got one last week!). With VCDEasy, you can easily take pictures or video and painlessly record it onto a disc that can be read by the DVD player attached to your TV.

 

Out of all the requests I get to cover a topic, burning CDs and DVDs – especially video CDs and DVDs – is probably at the top of the list. If you’ve ever done it or thought about it, you know why people are desperately seeking advice, even from the likes of me: The digital video world is a jungle of formats, encoding schemes, and CD/DVD burner formats and settings, in addition to the usual questions of video format – NTSC and PAL, to name just two – and it’s only the truly adventurous that try their luck at burning one.

 

So I’ve put off writing about this topic until I could describe a method that would pretty much work for everyone, without requiring a graduate degree in digital video technology – or requiring users to spend hours poring over poorly written manuals that use Mandarin Chinese sentence structures to describe highly technical subjects. But VCDEasy looks like the real goods. The program works flawlessly, and there is an extensive help file in which the author discusses the finer points of formats and settings available.

 

I purposely ignored the directions on my first tries with VCDEasy, just to see if the hype measured up to the reality, and I was able to put together a number of VCDs, which played just fine on a DVD using the out-of-the-box settings provided by the author. VCDEasy really is an easy to use program, and if you feed it your digital files, it will do its thing and spit out a VCD, suitable for framing – or playing.

 

So, don’t take anything in this rest of this article as criticism of VCDEasy. The program significantly cut the time I had to spend on burning video CDs, compared to other programs and methods I have used. It’s easy and automatic enough for even a novice to use. Any problems in the process are outside the jurisdiction of VCDEasy.

 

Warning: Geek talk coming  (only one paragraph, though). The key to a successful VCD production is ensuring your file is in the right format – and has the right Codec (more on these below). In order to make a VCD, your video must be in MPEG-1 or 2 format. MPEG is a compression method, optimized for video compression, that allows really big digital media files to get scrunched down onto the limited disk space of a CD or DVD – or to be downloaded from a Website, like an MP3 (MPEG-1 audio layer 3) which is a type of MPEG compression.

 

So, the bottom line is that in order for VCDEasy to work its magic, you have to make sure your files are in MPEG-1 or 2 format. The program does not convert from other formats (like AVI) for you – you have to do it manually.

 

So said the instructions. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the program does indeed convert between digital stills (JPEGs, TIFFs, bitmaps, Photoshop format images, etc) and MPEG-1. In fact, my first VCDEasy project was a VCD of still images I had taken with my digital video camera. Making the digital stills VCD was easy as could be. I simply selected the pictures, which were in JPEG format and VCDEasy did the rest – including converting and encoding them into MPEG-1 format. In went the files, and out popped the VCD from my regular CD burner.

 

This was great! I was really rolling here! I popped the VCD into a DVD player, and got a nice slide show type program that utilized all the features of the DVD player software. I made a second stills VCD, this time playing around with some of the settings, like changing the delay between shots.

 

Now it was time to get ambitious – and try to produce a VCD with moving images on it. As it happens, my digital video camera (Canon PowerShot A60 – see review and info at www.megapixel.net/reviews/canon-a60/a60-review.html) is able to record video, too. So I took one of my short video files and uploaded it into VCDEasy.

 

This time, things weren’t so easy. VCDEasy doesn’t do video conversions, so I had to get my files into the proper MPEG-1 format in order to get my VCD going, and it seems that my digital camera recorded its files in AVI format. AVI (Audio/Video Interleaved) is usually associated with Windows, and indeed it is the preferred format for Windows Media Player and other Microsoft products.

 

No problem; I opened up my copy of TMPGEnc (http://www.tmpgenc.net/), which specializes in convert video files from one compression method to another. I have successfully used TMPGEnc in the past to convert files from AVI to MPEG for playback by Quicktime on Macintosh computers, so I know the program and method work just fine.

 

Not this time, though; I got the dreaded “file format cannot be processed” message that is the bane of anyone working with digital files, and pops up all too often, in my opinion. Oh, why can’t they all just get their act together and use a single easy to implement format?

 

But whining wasn’t going to solve this. I had a dilemma here; the file identified itself as an AVI, but the tools that usually work with AVI weren’t working. What could the problem be?

 

Obviously, it was (pregnant pause for dramatic effect) – the Codec. A Codec is an encoder/decoder that lets files be played on different equipment or using different methods (like digital phone signals on analog telephones). Codecs are the bane of digital video hobbyists, because they are like the little surprise in the box of Crackerjacks; you never know what you’re going to get, and figuring out how to put it together is always a hassle, and it never works right even when you build it. Without getting too technical, suffice to say that without the right Codec, you can’t play or convert a file on your computer, even if it is ostensibly in the same format (like AVI).

 

After many minutes (many, many minutes) of trying to track down the problem, I got the bright idea to try and play the file using Quicktime Player (www.apple.com/quicktime/download/), which very conveniently lists specific formats. Quicktime informed me that my AVI format was something called Motion JPEG, which eventually led me to http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/, where I was able to download a Motion JPEG Codec. After which I was able to use TMPGEnc to convert my uploaded digital camera video to MPEG-1 format, which allowed me to convert it in VCDEasy – and produce a VCD which worked just fine in my DVD player.

 

Friend, I bring you this tale of woe not to seek your sympathy, but to describe a method for the adventurous among you to do as I did. Download VCDEasy, TMPGEnc, and Quicktime Player, upload a video from your digital camera or digital camcorder, and start producing your own videos. The same questions/problems crop up when converting between other formats and MPEG-1 (I would stay away from SVCD/MPEG-2 for now) – but, using these tools, jumping over the digital valley is a little bit less daunting than it once was.

 

VCDEasy and TMPENgc for Windows 98 systems and better; both are shareware, with free trial period and limitations on file sizes in the free version.

 

Questions/comments to ds@newzgeek.com