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 this program 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 identify then open and hence edit
that file, with some freeware program, so that the resultant revised
collection of files will run with my own opening 'menu' please?

Thanks

 

[carson]

<snip>

I'm totally guessing here, But have you looked for a folder
in the program file named template?
possibly those files could be edited
try to open with all your photo editors
I use Ulead - in order to edit their templates
I have to use a Ulead photo editor
the cybermax website mentions power point as well
so that could also be a clue.
but, just a uneducated guess
hope it helps?

 

[Terry Pinnell]

<snip>

I'm totally guessing here, But have you looked for a folder
in the program file named template?
possibly those files could be edited
try to open with all your photo editors
I use Ulead - in order to edit their templates
I have to use a Ulead photo editor
the cybermax website mentions power point as well
so that could also be a clue.
but, just a uneducated guess
hope it helps?

Brilliant, thanks! I hadn't thought of that approach. There are in
fact what look like *two* relevant folders: \Template which has a JPG
that looks like a background, and \Menu which contains pairs of files,
one say Beach.jpg containing the objectionable image and title, and
another called Beach.des, which is a bit of a mystery, as it contains
just one text line: 224 189 496 393. Maybe co-ordinates?

But, although it may prove tricky to get these various elements
altered properly, that looks a very promising line of attack. Much
appreciated!