Hey Guys, My wife wants to make some home videos to send over to family in India. What needs to be done to get a video to play on a vcd/dvd player player over there. Formatting, software, etc. We have a mac and a pc so any kind of help is appreciated. If you know of any links on how to make these please let me know.
did you already shoot the videos? if so, what format are the videos in now? have you tried using windows movie maker? it should already be loaded on your machine if you use xp. it has the option to make videos in PAL format....
you should make them into PAL vcds obviously its a lot easier to make compared to PAL dvds. i think you need to encode the video in a mpeg-1 format at any resolution really and then you can use a burning program to burn to vcd format. I know in the past i used nero to burn videos to vcd it would have pretty simple feature to just place the video into the program and it would encode over to a vcd in either format (it would need to be specified before hand though in the preferences if you want ntsc or pal) the only problem was that it wasnt very big on features...you couldnt create chapters or anything it was just one big vcd video so if you make a video your relatives would have to watch it all the way through or if they stopped they would have to FF all the way to the part they left off on. other than that i dont have much else on vcds i stopped encoding to vcds a long time ago but i am sure if you do some google searches you should be able to find some programs www.doom9.org has a lot of useful guides and programs for dvd "backups" there is a vcd/svcd guide on there as well while its for "dvd backups" the process and programs are probably the same for regular videos as soon as you have the video in a mpeg-1 format depending on where they live in india if they have internet access maybe you can just make youtube videos of them and send them the links? cant you make videos private on youtube so only people who you approve via subscription or something can view them? that maybe an option as well.
You could take this with you: <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3zfWhZ8_-JM&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3zfWhZ8_-JM&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
We use a normal US video camera purchased about a 2 years ago. It used those small digital video tapes you upload to your computer.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5VrS1iJ7Wyw&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5VrS1iJ7Wyw&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>