Quick Question

[lordroba]

Yo, I've created my movie, exported it as avi, and it was around 345 megs. So then I decided to make it smaller by running it throught Nero. So I went to burn it as VCD. Before Nero burns the video on the CD, it goes through it's own encoding process. Anyways, the burnt CD has the video file and it brought it down to 40 megs without reducing quality.

Now my question is, can I upload the movie that is on the CD. The movie works fine and It will work on any computer, I just want to know if we are allowed to upload .DAT files.

[Scintilla]

Yo, I've created my movie, exported it as avi, and it was around 345 megs. So then I decided to make it smaller by running it throught Nero. So I went to burn it as VCD. Before Nero burns the video on the CD, it goes through it's own encoding process. Anyways, the burnt CD has the video file and it brought it down to 40 megs without reducing quality.

Actually, no it didn't. Every time you compress to MPEG(-1 or -2, it doesn't matter), there is a quality loss involved, because MPEG is lossy.

Whether anyone <i>notices</i> that loss or not is another story.

Now my question is, can I upload the movie that is on the CD. The movie works fine and It will work on any computer, I just want to know if we are allowed to upload .DAT files.

I don't believe we are; and even if we were, you'd get tons of questions about "What the heck is a .DAT file?".

I know that it works in most or all media players if you rename it to .MPG (since the video stream is just MPEG-1), but I don't think it'll be a real, honest-to-goodness MPEG system file unless you run it through something like <a href="http://www.tmpgenc.net">TMPGEnc</a>'s MPEG Tools (which allow you to merge, cut, mu[ltiple]x, and demu[ltiple]x without actually recompressing the streams, so no quality loss).

[TaranT]

Although I still recommend TMPGEnc for this (the free version is adequate if you're only making MPEG1; for MPEG2, buy v2.5+), you can still use Nero 6 Ultra as follows.

Open StartSmart and select Make Video CD (opens NeroVision Express 2).
Select Add Video Files and Open the video file.
Click the Export button on the bottom toolbar.
You'll see the default settings for a VCD compliant file. The filename will have an "mpg" suffix.
Click Export (bottom right) to make the file.

Or...

At the top right, select the Custom export template (opens new page).
Set the File Type to MPEG1. Video mode should be NTSC. You can experiment with the other settings. Click export to make the file.

[lordroba]

Thanks a lot for the help. I downloaded TMPGEnc's MPEG Tool and it worked great. I got the 340 Meg file down to a nice little 40 meg package. I don't think I have the same version, as you (TaranT), so I couldn't figure out what to do, but thank for trying anyways.