D-cat

Does anyone know of a program or script that'll convert a VideoCD to DVD format while preserving the menus and chapter data?

I've amassed a small collection over the years, but am now finding increasingly DVD players dropping support for the VCD format (lazy firmware programmers!!!), so I am looking to see if there's a way I can move them over without having to re-author every one of them.

Thanks.

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Rubberman

I'm not sure about the chapter breaks and such, but ffmpeg will convert your VCD videos to DVD-compatible MPEG-2 files which can be used with a DVD authoring program to make the VOB set that is required for a DVD. Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent FOSS DVD authoring tool as yet for Linux. Those that exist are a real PITA to use, so normally I run TMPGEnc DVD Author under Wine for that purpose.

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D-cat

A lot of people (and programs) don't know this, but you actually don't have to transcode a VCD stream to incorporate it into a DVD... Since MPEG-1 is forward compatible with MPEG-2, and the low-res DVD spec matches the standard VCD spec (not an accident I'm sure), any DVD player can play a VCD thats been VOB'd into the right format... though some may require an audio transcode to AC3. This means that it is possible to covert a VCD to DVD with no quality loss... but, you still have to reauthor all the menus and chapter entry points with any tools I can find.

I have so far been using ManDVD to make my DVD videos... it's simple and it works, however, it's not very functional if you want to make something more complicated than a single movie playback. Others either don't work or are so friggen technical that you'd have to be an IFO engineer to understand how to use it. What I'd really like for a DVD front-end (a tad OT) is something similar to EasyVCD Creator, where you can litterally walk through all the button choices and make buttons/keys that link to what you want in plain language... that program is why I have some pretty nice VCD's complete with menus and chapters that I don't want to re-author. I'll take a look at TMPG, thanks for the suggestion.

I would think it wouldn't be too ridiculously hard for a media programmer to rip a VCD structure to a universal format like xml and use it as a framework to build a DVD with all the matching menus and chapters. I however am not a media programmer, but I have a hard time believing that there's no interest in such an application. Anybody know anyone who'd be interested in taking on the task?