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Producing Great Sound for Digital Video
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Convert VideoCD DAT Movies To MPEG
by Geetesh Bajaj,
January 2 2007
The easiest way to convert the DAT movie files within a VideoCD disc to a common movie file format like MPEG is to use a free application called VCDGear. You can download a copy of VCDGear here...
Remember to download a version for Windows -- however, if you want to use this tutorial for a Mac version of VCDGear, you can still make it work with a few differences.
Installing VCDGear is simple since it's a single EXE file that you run -- most of the time, it's called vcdgear.exe
Thereafter, follow these instructions:
- Place the VideoCD in your CD or DVD drive, and if you are prompted with an autorun option that offers to play the VideoCD for you, just click Cancel.
- Now, open the MPEGAV folder within the VideoCD, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The MPEGAV folder
- Depending upon your VideoCD, you'll find one or more files with a DAT extension within this folder. Copy any of these DAT files to your hard disk.
- Launch the VCDGear application by double-clicking the EXE file. Soon, you'll see the VCDGear interface that provides a bewildering arrays of options as shown in Figure 2 -- for reasons of simplicity, we'll only explore the options that are required for this tutorial.
Figure 2: The interface
- Click the vcdgear button. Then, access the Extraction/Conversion drop down list and choose the dat -> mpeg option, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Choose the conversion option
- Several check boxes are available for this conversion -- but they are all optional. You might want to try working with them.
- Click on the Load button, which summons a dialog box that allows you to navigate and choose your DAT file.
- Immediately thereafter, another dialog box prompts you for the name and location of your MPEG output -- provide these details, and click the Save button to get back to the VCDGear interface.
- Finally, click on Start button -- and wait and watch as VCDGear creates a MPEG file from the VideoCD DAT file.
Note: Some VideoCD DAT files can be very long -- so you might want to make smaller movie clips of the MPEG output file -- but that's something I'll cover in another tutorial.
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