Turning mpgs into VCD format?

[Ebisoba]

Is there a way to do it? What program and hopefully it's free?

[vfrxsw]

You can do it for free see http://www.vcdhelp.com/tmpgenc.htm

[VERT]

heaps of information and help over at Digital Digest

they have lots of software there too and its all free

[muno]

mpegs are often encoded into vcd format, or, they could be svcd format also.
You get an error message if the mpeg isn't compliant with the standards. Eg, dragging an mpeg file to an vcd compilation in nero will check the file - and tell any incompabilities it finds. Sometimes those can be disrecarded, sometimes not.

Creating incompatible disc might work, my dvd player refuses to play the audio track of true svcd disc, but if I burn it as vcd forcing incompatible format it will work fine, wíth svcd quality, the dvd just detects it as vcd.

If the mpeg stream isn't standard, nero has some plugins (for sure about svcd, not sure about vcd) that will re-encode it to compatible format.
-M

[Ebisoba]

I have some avi files to convert too. I tried using TMPGEnc and the final file (it's in a .mpg format) size is 217 meg from a 40 meg avi file what the..?

[muno]

if the avi is compressed, eg. divx uses avi extension the file size will increase dramatically. mpeg1 compression isn't very good. you get the same - or even better - image quality with half the size of the mpeg.
-M