Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

David writes, "I did a wedding and made a SVCD of it before I had a DVD burner. The friend I made it for has never been able to see it. Now I want to convert it to DVD either by software or by reimporting it into camera and then importing it into my software or by converting it to AVI?"

Depending on the tools you used to create the SVCD and how many individual video clips you put on a single SVCD disk, this process is potentially quite simple. The SVCD format stores information in a series of folders, just like the DVD format. Unlike the DVD format, SVCD doesn't take the MPEG-2 video file and break it into a series of .VOB extension files. SVCD also doesn't separate audio and video into discreet files, instead leaving them combined as one single file, in part because you don't have the option to choose between multiple soundtrack options with SVCD. Assuming you didn't add any kind of copy protection to the video files or the disk itself, extracting the video is a simple matter.

All MPEG video files stored on an SVCD should be in the appropriately named MPEG2 folder. In most cases there will be only one video file in this folder. The video file likely has a completely meaningless name like AVSEQ01.MPG. Removing one or more videos from the folder should be as simple as copying them from the disk to your hard drive. Unlike DVD files, this MPG file contains both audio and video data, so there's no complicated recombining the audio and video using six different apps and losing most of your hair by the fistful.

Once the video file is transferred to your PC, fire up your favorite DVD burning application and start creating a DVD. I personally stick with Sonic MyDVD because I like the large collection of community created backgrounds and themes, but there are plenty of alternatives, including Nero, Easy Media Creator and a whole host of apps with slightly less features.

In a few rare instances with older applications, you may have issues getting the software to accept the standard SVCD 480x480 video with 44.1kHz audio in your DVD authoring application. Considering most current DVD authoring programs will handle transcoding SVCD format video and audio to DVD 480p 48kHz media without any convoluted steps, I'm not going to walk through any of the painstaking alternatives. Easy Media Creator is available for as low as $20 with upgrade rebates at most electronics stores. If it's important to transfer the video files, the time you save in taking the easy route on this is worth far more than $20.