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I love & dote on my cousin's kid Siddhu. Infact my weekends in Chennai are mostly for him and I go to my brother's house just to be with him. There can never be a happy moment than watching the kids playing. If the kid in question is less than an year, the pleasure is double. I used to capture a lot of his playful acts in my mobile phone's camera. Siddhu is turning an year old this Sunday and I thought of burning those mobile videos into a VCD. The problem is that Nero Express I am using doesn't support the mobile video formats i.e 3gp. So I HAD TO find a way to encode mobile video to VCD writeable format (i.e mpeg, avi formats). After a long search, I stumbled upon this wonderful piece of freeware that converts a wide formats of video & audio files to legacy formats like mpeg-1/2 & mp3/wav for audio

The software in the question is SUPER and can be downloaded from 'http://fever.link.free.fr/SUPER.html' and it is of 14MB approximately. It supports converting various unconventional video formats like "3gp, flv, asf, fli, flc, ogg, qt, str, swf, viv, wob" and even known formats like "rm, avi, mpg, mov" to standard formats like "mpeg-1, mpeg-2, 3gp" and so on. Once you download the software, you can find the list of formats supported. Since it is a freeware in development condition, the interface is of somewhat lacking glamour and slightly intimidating.

Note: You can use this tutorial to create VCD from "flv" files that you downloaded from YouTube.Com instead of 3gp videos.

Step 1: Converting 3gp to MPEG/AVI format (Fig. 1, Fig. 2)

Run the 'SUPER' and add the list of files to be encoded either by right clicking and adding through "Open" dialog or simply drag & drop. Once you have added the files, choose the output format you want. Here in this example I have chosen MPEG-1 format because I can manipulate the video files like merging/splitting/adding extra sound track to the raw video. Another reason being that the freeware TMPGEnc I use to do these tasks support MPEG-1 only. Let's see that later, so as of now, choose MPEG-1 as 'Output' type and 'mp-2' as audio output. Don't bother much about the other options and if you prefer to overwrite the audio with songs/instrumental music, I suggest to check the "Disable Audio" box. Press the "Encode now" button and you are done with.

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The following is an optional step and if you want to skip it, go VCD burning through Nero Express directly (Step 3, here).

Step 2: Manipulate the MPEG file. (Optional)

Not all the times the video file we had shot is consistent. One of the long video clip I shot with Siddhu had longer sections that better could be chopped off. Also I wanted to merge all the mpeg files into one large file suitable for audio mixing and VCD writing. TMPGEnc was the suitable answer for my requirements. As a principle I never pay for softwares, so freewares and cracks (even though unethical) are fine with me.

You can download TMPGEnc from their official homepage 'http://www.tmpgenc.net' and is about just 1.7 MB. It is not an installing package, so just extract the zip file contents into a folder and click the *.exe file to run the application. Even though it is capable of various functions, our tutorial is just restricted to splitting & merging the video file. As a freeware it supports MPEG-1 only, thats why I encoded the mobile video (3gp) to MPEG-1 in the previous step using SUPER.

2. A. Splitting the Video Clip (Fig. 4, Fig. 5, Fig. 6)

i. Once you start the program, you'll get a 'wizard'. Cancel it and choose "MPEG Tools" from "File" menu.

ii. Choose "Merge & Cut" and add the video file to be split.

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iii. Click the "Edit" button and you'll get a new window with small screen and duration for the initial and final frame of the clip.

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iv. Choose the staring point and press "{" and "}" for the end point of the clips in the "Range".

v. Give the output a suitable name and choose "Run".

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Now the clip of desired size is created.
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2. B. Merging the Video Clips (Fig. 4, Fig. 6, Fig. 7)

i. Once you start the program, you'll get a 'wizard'. Cancel it and choose "MPEG Tools" from "File" menu.

ii. Choose "Merge & Cut" and add the video file to be merged.

iii. Add the files to be merged in the desired order.

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iv. Choose the name & location of Output file and press "Run". Now you can visually see the "video streams" being merged.

2. C. Mixing Audio and Video tracks (Fig. 8)

I prefer retaining the original voice & noise that were there when recording a video. But sometimes people might wish of replacing them with songs / instrumental music of their choice. The prerequisite of doing this is that both the video and audio clips must be of same length / duration. Else after the song is over you get a 'silent' background music, not the original voice.

i. Once you start the TMPGEnc program, you'll get a 'wizard'. Cancel it.

ii. In the bottom of programme window, you can see the fields "Video Source", "Audio Source" and "Output File". Besides to these fields, you can find various radioboxes, out of which choose "System (Video + Audio)".

iii. Populate the fields with necessary files and press "Start" button in the top of window

3. Burning the video using Nero Express.

With the previous steps 1 (and 2), we have prepared the video file in a suitable format for burning in VCD. For this purposeI am using Nero Express to burn into VCD. And I presume almost every PC user knows the process of VCD burning. To keep it short, click "Videos/Pictures" from the initial screen and choose "VideoCD" option. Add the desired mpeg file to be burnt in VCD and click "Finished". In the subsequent screen choose "Burn" option. Thats it.Please remember that you are creating a video for larger screen from a clip of smaller resolution (176x144 pixels only). So don't expect a DVD quality picture. The video quality is always proportional to the source video only.

Most of you might have noticed that in the download section, I have added lot of mobile videos (3gp video) from Tamil, Telugu, Hindi movies. This is the reverse of these process i.e "Creating mobile videos from VCDs & DVDs" and it will be discussed later.