Video CD Authoring Guide

From user cleeg in the TerraOnion Discord:

If making videos from an MKV or other common video file for a Saturn with an MPEG VCD decoder card, the following steps are required for an NTSC video. Bear in mind, this is non standard encoding for the VCD format, as the Saturn has a 2x speed drive making it possible to tweek the parameters of the standard for a quality increase. When done, we will have a CD image that is around 1.5GB in size, so cannot be burned whole but can be used with the MODE or other (I imagine) ODEs. Any option in any of the following programs not specified or left unticked is the default and was not altered.

I started here, thanks to the author:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/saturn/916393-sega-saturn/faqs/12540

We will be making an NTSC format video.

If starting with an AVI or similar legacy format, we can skip to step 2)

I am sure that using FFMPEG would be more elegant and simple, meaning we could do this all in one go, but for those of us who prefer / need to use a GUI, this method works well, but is not quick!.

---

1) If a more modern format, such as MP4 or MKV is being used in the first instance, we must first create a high quality AVI file, which would either match closely in quality to, or exceed that of the original file. Any suitable program would work, I use AVS video converter 8.1 with the following settings enabled and saved as a conversion profile (I imagine a similar program utilising the same codecs would have similarly selectable options somewhere):

OUTPUT FILE

Video Codec MPEG4 (DivX/Xvid compatible) Frame Size Original Bitrate 8000 Frame Rate 29,97 fps

Audio Codec MP2 Sample Rate 44100 Hz 16bit Bitrate 320kbps Channels Stereo

ADVANCED VIDEO SETTINGS

Profile @ Level Advanced Simple @ L5 Encoding Type Twopass - 2nd Pass (I always like two pass encoding, but it takes ages, so decide what suits best. This might not be a problem on new computers - mine is old!) Quantization type H.263 Motion search type 6 (Ultra High) VHQ mode 4 (Wide Search)

ASPECT OPTIONS

Make sure input and output options are left as ORIGINAL

Everything else I left as is, but the above encoded a bit for bit Blu Ray MKV I'd made into an AVI file of excellent quality, so I haven't fiddled with anything else.

Run the conversion, and after a good while, we will have our AVI file that we can run through another program to make our MPEG1 file that the Saturn can play.

---

2) Now we need TMPGEnc 2.5 with the following settings (again, save a profile) enabled:

VIDEO TAB

Stream type MPEG-1 Video Size 352 x 240 Aspect Ratio 1:1 (VGA) Framerate 29.97 fps Rate control mode Constant bitrate (CBR) Bitrate 2000 VBV buffer size 40 Motion search precision Highest quality (very slow)

ADVANCED TAB

Video source type Interlace Field order Bottom field first (field B) Source Aspect ratio 1:1 (VGA) Positioning method No margin (keep aspect ratio)

AUDIO TAB

Stream type MPEG-1 Audio Layer II Sampling frequency 44100 Channel mode Stereo Bitrate 160 (This is the minimum quality my ears have found to still sound good, your milage may vary, I reduce to this to keep file sizes a little smaller)

SYSTEM TAB

Stream Type MPEG-1 Video-CD (non-standard) (IMPORTANT, anything else seems to give stuttery results)

We can now start our final reencode that will result in an MPEG1 file the Saturn can play. It doesn't take quite as long as part 1).

---

3) We now need to package the file up into a disc image that the MODE can mount, using VCDGear v3.56 build 050213 beta

Select the following:

Under the video-cd button:

VideoCD Creation Method mpeg -> cue/bin[cd image] VCD Tick this box

Add your video file to the VideoCD Track List, select your desired save location and hit start.

We are done!

---

When watched on a CRT this looks surprisingly good, it was very interesting to pare a Blu Ray down to this kind of file, and still have it watchable. I especially like that it would never have been watched back in the day on this hardware.