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Convert SVCD to DVD Apps
With DVD burners now a standard feature in many Macs, people are looking for ways to convert their old SVCDs to DVDs. This is a very easy process, but it took me a little investigative work to find the best way to do it.
  1. Tools: The tools used here can either be downloaded and compiled individually, or borrowed from ffmpegx. The easiest way is to download ffmpegx and simply copy them from within the application -- control-click on the ffpmegx application, navigate to Contents -> Resources, and copy them to a sane location (such as /usr/local/bin or /opt/local/bin). For this particular task, you'll only need two tools: vcdxrip and mpgtx.

  2. Use vcdxrip to rip the MPEG layer out of the SVCD. It will create a file called avstream01.mpg. Be careful to rename this after it's complete, as running another instance of vcdxrip will overwrite this file. Examples:
    $ vcdxrip -b vcd.bin
    $ vcdxrip -c /dev/cdrom
    
  3. Join the MPEGs into one large MPEG using mpgtx. Examples:
    $ mpgtx -j -o  joined.mpg part1.mpg part2.mpg
    
  4. Burn the joined MPEG using Toast or another recording package.
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one. Please note that, although built from open source tools, ffmpegx is a shareware package. If it saves you time and effort, you should consider supporting the author's efforts, or get the two tools from their free sources: vcdxrip is part of VCDImager, and mpgtx is a standalone program.]
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Convert SVCD to DVD | 9 comments | Create New Account
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geekier way without transcoding
Authored by: tetsuotheironman on Feb 18, '05 10:44:40AM

http://homepage.mac.com/rnc/SVCDtoDVD.html

works fine for me..



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Convert SVCD to DVD
Authored by: RiotNrrrd on Feb 18, '05 01:35:01PM
(Not sure this is really Mac OS X Hints fodder ... )

There are reams and reams of stuff about doing this type of thing (and oodles of other transcoding matrix discussions) over on

http://www.VideoHelp.COM/

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Convert SVCD to DVD
Authored by: thoughton on Feb 18, '05 03:20:38PM

I couldn't understand why this hint would possibly work in the way described, so I gave it a try. As a result I defy anyone to turn a SVCD into a DVD with these highly incomplete instructions :-)

Aside from numerous omissions (where did the vcd.bin file come from? where has he copied vcdxrip to? did he include the path to vcdxrip in his .profile file?) there are so many other things wrong:

1. vcdxrip from the latest version of ffmpegX (0.0.9s) does not recognise the -c flag.

2. at least on my Mac (10.3.8), after inserting a SVCD (or a VCD) you cannot access it at /dev/cdrom

3a. the only way you're going to end up with a DVD this way is if you use Toast 6's 'video' tab and let it re-encode the SVCD's 480x480 video and 44.1KHz audio into 720x480 video and 48KHz audio. This is going to take hours and will significantly reduce the visual quality. The 'geekier' method described in the first reply above is a far better way of maintaining quality (although possibly at the expense of compatibility, some DVD players won't play SVCD resolution files from a DVD).

3b. on the other hand, if you simply burn the 480x480 44.1KHz mpeg2 in UDF format via Toast's 'data' tab, Toast will not re-encode it. But all you're going to end up with is a DVD containing a muxed mpeg2 file. This isn't a valid DVD structure, so the vast majority of DVD players won't recognise it.



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vcdxrip alternatives
Authored by: thoughton on Feb 18, '05 03:26:57PM

Instead of using vcdxrip to extract the mpeg you can also just download Gumby or VCDXtools. (VCDXtools is no longer supported, and is kind of hard to find these days, but it still works perfectly.)



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Yet another way of ripping mpeg stream from SVCD
Authored by: tetsuotheironman on Feb 20, '05 08:11:24AM

like the original post states, the VCD ripping application gives an incomplete copy of .bin file.
You can also use VLC to do this (as VLC is able to access SVCD volumes fine)
Just go to 'File/Open' select the SVCD volume and check the box for 'Advanced output'
you can then configure it to just dump the raw input to a file (or transcode it if you so desire). After dumping (goes faster than real time in most cases), you'll have the full mpg file at your disposal.



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Convert SVCD to DVD
Authored by: wallybear on Feb 21, '05 01:29:00PM

1) The ffmpeg version of vcdxrip does not accept the -c parameters
2) there is no /dev/cdrom device

you can accomplish the same task with the following syntax:

vcdxrip -b /dev/disk2

where "disk2" is the mount point of your optical unit (disk2 in my case as I have two hard drives, disk0 and disk1). You can find the mount point using this command from Terminal (insert a CDor DVD first):

$ mount
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/swap 1 (local)
/dev/disk0s5 on /Volumes/Backup (local, journaled)
/dev/disk1s10 on /Volumes/Macintosh HD (local, journaled)
/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/MYCD (local)

In this case /dev/disk2s1 is the optical reader. Remove the "s1" suffix and you'll get the device (/dev/disk2) to be used with vcdxrip.

That's all



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Convert SVCD to DVD
Authored by: silicontrip on Feb 20, '05 09:53:03PM

There are a few problems with this approach.

SVCDs resolution are most commonly 480x480 or 480x576. This is an invalid horizontal resolution for DVDs. The audio is also 44.1kHz sample rate which is also invalid for DVDs

If you have a really cheap and nasty DVD player which doesn't care about standards, this type of invalid disk will (probably) play perfectly well.

However I would recommend using ffmpeg to scale and reconvert the video and audio.

example would be;

ffmpeg -i svcd.mpg -s 720x576 -vcodec mpeg2video -b 9500 -maxrate 9500 -bufsize 230 -f mpeg1video -aspect 16:9 -hq dvd.m2v

replace 576 with 480 for NTSC, and then the audio

ffmpeg -i svcd.mpg -ar 48000 -ab 224 dvd.ac3

then you need to mux the resulting files.

mplex -f 8 -V -o dvd.mpg dvd.m2v dvd.ac3

The mpgtx step should be replaced with the really wonderful command line tool dvdauthor, which can be built for MacOSX. It will join the mpegs as chapters and make the correct VMG and VTS IFO files.

try;

dvdauthor -t -o dvd_directory mpeg1.mpg mpeg2.mpg ...

then

dvdauthor -T -o dvd_directory

This will create a DVD directory structure with the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories which you can throw into your dvd burning software. I use mkisofs and the apple hdiutil to burn the DVD but anything will work.

I can't remember where I collected all these tools from but I know that they all work fine on OSX.

Mark



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Convert SVCD to DVD
Authored by: ropers on Feb 21, '05 12:41:02AM
I grabbed the mpgtx-1.3.1.tar.gz source package from http://mpgtx.sourceforge.net/ as suggested by robg.

As per the README, I then tried
$ ./configure --parachute
in the extracted directory. (NB: The $ merely denotes that I typed this at the Terminal prompt.)
So far so good. I then proceeded to
$ make
The results were good. I went on to
$ make install
Error. Error. Does not compute. It turns out that the resulting install script uses the "d" flag of the cp command (cf. $ man cp). That flag does not exist in Mac OS X's cp command. Neither does it, for that matter exist in some other BSD operating systems, eg. it's not in OpenBSD's cp either.
Only Linux cp appears to have the "d" flag.
It seemed to me that the "R" flag appeared to be BSD cp's equivalent of the "d" flag.

Okay, time for a fat disclaimer:
I DO NOT REALLY KNOW WHAT I'M DOING. I THINK THE BELOW MIGHT BE A SOLUTION, BUT I COULD BE TOTALLY WRONG. DON'T BLAME ME IF YOU HOSE YOUR SYSTEM.

So I edited the file named "Makefile" and replaced

cpflags=d
with
cpflags=R

I then again did
$ make install

That seemed to work. If you can confirm that this is a valid solution, then please also consider feeding back this info to the author of mpgtx. I haven't done that now because my confidence in the validity of my solution isn't all that high.


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Convert SVCD to DVD
Authored by: PeteVerdon on Mar 12, '05 05:09:24PM

> Please note that, although built from open source tools, ffmpegx is a shareware package

Both the open-source tools you mention are licensed under the GPL, which requires that any software built from them also be GPL*. By offering it under an alternative license, the author of ffmpegx is breaking the terms of the license under which he's allowed to use the copyrighted open-source tools.

Pete

* Note that you /are/ allowed to charge for GPL software. But there's little point, because the first person to buy a copy can legally give it to everyone else.



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