Saturday, May 16, 2009

Making 2 VCDs into one DVD

Fed-up with having to remove the first and insert the second VCD of a very popular Disney movie that my grandchildren loved, I decided to combine the two VCDs into one DVD.
Well I read that VCD files have the extension .DAT and that you needed to rename this to .mpg before you could proceed further since most DVD burning programs did not recognise .dat as a video file. I tried renaming the two .DAT files that I extracted from each of the VCDs I wanted to combine into one DVD, but my Windows Vista would not allow me to do this and the renamed files looked like this filename.mpg.dat. This meant it was still a .dat file even after the renaming. Scouring the net I discovered that you had to use tools to change how Windows Explorer displayed file names. For some reason or other Windows Explorer by default hides the extension names when displaying contents of folders (at least it did on my machine), and I had to change this before I could effect any change of extension names. How to do so? Click on "Computer" then left click on "Organise" and go to the option "Folder and Search Options" then go to "View" and unclick the option that says "Hide extensions for known file types". Now you will see file names with extensions and these can be renamed easily.

The next step was simple: import the two .mpg files into a DVD burning program -- the one I used was Magix Goya BurnR which I got when I purchased the wonderful Magix Movie Edit Pro 12 for $50 at Challenger last year -- and burn your DVD just as you would your home movies. Just make sure that you burn the files in the correct order and this you can do by giving them the same file name except for the numerals 1 and 2 for example mymovie1 and mymovie2.

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