I have been trying to export my 45 minute iMovie epic to Video CD format and have been having some very mixed results. Can anyone explain what is happening?
First, the set up: I have access to two Macs. One is a 1.25ghz G4 dual processor running OS 10.2, iMovie 2 and Toast 5. The other is a 400mhz G4 running OS 9.1, iMovie 2 and Toast 4. I do not have a DVD player (other than the one in the Macs) so I cannot check that my Video CD's will play in a domestic unit easily.
On the OSX machine, I can simply export straight from iMovie through to Toast and onto Video CD. This takes quite a while for the movie to render in the new format but gives me a perfect VCD which I have had checked and will play ok in a domestic DVD player.
However, if I then drag the rendered mpeg-1 file into Toast again to make a second VCD everything seems ok with Toast creating the extra data files required and happily burning away. BUT when I play the film back on the OSX machine through QuickTime there is no picture or sound - all I get is an empty grey box in the middle of the player while the timer arrow shows that there is a 45 minute feature to play though. However, if I take the disc home and play it on the OS9 machine, the picture and sound appears and everything is ok!! I have been unable as yet to check this disc in a commercial DVD player. The info panel within QuickTime confirms that the file is MPEG1 muxed format, 320x240pixels playing at a data rate of 169.6kb/sec.
Next I tried to make a disc image of the "good" Video CD via the Disk Copy utility on the Mac and then create a CD from that. This resulted in both machines giving me the error message: "Image Disc operation did not complete (-39). An unexpected end-of-line was encountered in Video_CD which may indicate it is corrupt or damaged."
I then tried to create a disk copy and disk image in Toast, but each time I got the message "Toast cannot copy a multi-track data disc" on both machines.
I'm pretty sure the Video CD duplicated on the OSX machine is OK - the data must be there for it to play via OS9, after all. Does anyone have any ideas why it cannot be viewed in OSX? Rendering a DVD via iDVD is not an option just yet for a whole host of reasons. As always, thanks in advance for all advice offered!