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.
- 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.
- 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
- Join the MPEGs into one large MPEG using mpgtx. Examples:
$ mpgtx -j -o joined.mpg part1.mpg part2.mpg
- 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.]