Editing a VCD?

[Terry Pinnell]

I'm a complete novice in the VCD/SVCD arena, and pretty unskilled with
CD/CD-RW come to that, so please bear with me.

I have a program from Cyberlink called MediaShow 3.0, which lets me
produce slideshows with music in VCD/SVCD formats, for playing on a
(modern) lounge DVD player. I'm making a 'video' for my son and
daughter-in-law with it, as mentioned in different context in a
separate recent post.

But it has one major shortcoming: the opening 'menu' picture (the
static screen that appears on loading, awaiting use of the remote
control to initiate the video), is offered in only a few unattractive
'templates'. Worse, all of them are childishly titled 'My Slideshow'
<yuck>.

I can't live with that. (I've emailed Cyberlink, but doubt if they'll
have any good news for me. Beats me how they could limit its
flexibility in such an obvious fashion.) However, rather than abandon
the program (which has some attractive features), I'd like to find a
way to *edit* that image. I'm hoping someone here can help me do so
please.

I've burned a small trial video (4 photos, no music) to CD and copied
the files to my HD to play with. Here are the four folders and their
respective contents:

EXT
LOT_X.VCD 64 KB
PSD_X.VCD 1 KB

MPEGAV
AVSEQ01.DAT 4,328 KB

SEGMENT
ITEM0001.DAT 1,957 KB

VCD
ENTRIES.VCD 2 KB
INFO.VCD 2 KB
LOT.VCD 64 KB
PSD.VCD 1 KB

I've also ZIPped them (2.2 MB), and uploaded them here if anyone wants
to actually play with them.
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/Trial.zip

I can open AVSEQ01.DAT in WMP9, so it must be an MPEG file, and it
plays the video's 4 photos - but not the opening image. That is
presumably the file ITEM0001.DAT. But that does *not* run in WMP9. It
gives message 'Windows Media Player encountered an unknown error.' So,
I guess it's not an MPG file? I tried arbitrarily changing its
extension to JPG and BMP, but no joy.

In my text editor, its binary content is incomprehensible to me, but
FWIW its first few characters display like this:
RIFFä CDXAfmt (the blank after the ä is a back-sloping ").

So, can anyone tell me how I might open and hence edit that file, so
that the resultant collection of files will run with my own opening
'menu' please?

Thanks

 

[da_test]

I'm a complete novice in the VCD/SVCD arena, and pretty unskilled with
CD/CD-RW come to that, so please bear with me.

I have a program from Cyberlink called MediaShow 3.0, which lets me
produce slideshows with music in VCD/SVCD formats, for playing on a
(modern) lounge DVD player. I'm making a 'video' for my son and
daughter-in-law with it, as mentioned in different context in a
separate recent post.

<snip>
here's a possibility - reauthor using vcdeasy and this tool:
http://www.briggsoft.com/vmlite.htm

Dave

 

[Terry Pinnell]

<snip>
here's a possibility - reauthor using vcdeasy and this tool:
http://www.briggsoft.com/vmlite.htm

Dave

Thanks Dave, VCD Menu Lite looks interesting, and I've installed it
for experiment. The snag is that for obvious reasons I don't really
want to have to use VCDEasy instead of MediaShow. So, although making
a new 'MPG still' to represent the menu might be easy enough, getting
that integrated with the vide as a whole might be tricky.

I'm also going to try one other approach suggested elsewhere: edit the
existing files in the menu/template folders installed by MediaShow.
Then hopefully these will be available to me in the UI.