/usr/share/doc/mjpegtools-1.6.1/HINTS

VCD's have very specific requirements as to the format of the multiplexed systems stream. For VCD these are actually at least "bendings" of the original MPEG standard and are far from optimal as far as maximising possible quality for software decoding goes.

The simplest way to generate VCD and SVCD streams that can be burnt to CD and played using DVD players etc is to use the lav2mpeg script with the "-V" and "-S" flags.

If you want to play around a couple of hints.

To build a VCD you absolutely *must* used the VCD format option for mplex "-f 1". This turns on a lot of weird stuff that otherwise has no place in a respectable multiplexer!

Obviously, to play on all players your original MPEG video must be the standard 1151Kbps and audio must be 224Kbps MPEG-1 layer 2 (as produced by the "-v" flag of mp2enc.

The systems streams generated by "-f 1" have been tested and succesfully burned onto CD using vcdimager and vcdburn.

An SVCD video stream is variable bit-rate MPEG-2 with a maximum rate of around 2500Kbps and a video buffer size of 230KB. Currently I recommend encoding -m 2 -F 3 or (for progressive material like PAL films) -m 2 -F 0. -F 1 and -F 2 will work but are currently handicapped by rather dumb code to choose the type of motion compensation. I have some suspicions that the rate control code and multiplexer needs adjusting for field sequences (-m 2 -F 1 and -F 2) also. To generate a legal S VCD program stream with mplex use the "-f 3" flag.