My DVD player (Panasonic RP-56) supports playing MP3 files that are burned as a data disk. But the user interface sucks. The album and file names are 8.3 format and make no sense.

So I'm wondering...

Is it possible to create a SVCD like disk with menus that contains mostly audio files? For example, the disk main menu contains the album title and cover graphics for several albums. Selecting a specific entry would play a video file (mpeg2 with mp3 audio) where the video consists of the album cover and the audio is each track from the album in succession.

Hmm... I'm going to try some test burns tonight. That goodness for CD-RW.

Hi DaveL:

You can do something better!
You can even do that with a regular VCD. Here's what you do:
Encode your music as MP2. That's right!. Not MP3. You can fit around 3 to 4 hours on a regular CD at 224Kbps! More if you go down to 128Kbps. What you do is you create a "dummy" video stream of 300Kbps with your MP2 music. Now each of your music is a track. Now you create your menu titles with your song's name, for example:
1) Styx - Babe
2) ABBA - Take a chance on me
3) Banannarama - Venus
etc.

And when you press a digit in your DVD player, you're actually going to the track that has your music. The best part of this is that this "Music VCD" will play in just about any standalone DVD player. And it doesn't have to be an MP3 player!. You do have to have a small bit rate video stream, because some players wont play without it

There are templates already made for this. Check the "tools/templates" at vcdhelp.

Just my .02$

Have fun!
-kwag

hey,

The video stream doesn't have to be a "dummy"! You can add jpegs to your mp3.

I used Kwag's 352x240 standard template, changed the bitrate to CBR 300kbps. Then load your jpeg into TMPGenc (might have to resize it if the resolutions are not multiples of 8. And load your mp3 straight into TMPGenc and encode! Load each of your mpegs into Nero vcd (non-standard) and burn it. Each mpeg is about 20mb (~5mb mp3, 100k jpg) so you can fit about 40 on a vcd.

This is especially useful for backing up a few Britney Spears albums and putting each of her naked jpegs to each song like I did. just kidding

But then you're only watching a still!. Why not put some of her "animations" with the music ( Just kidding )

-kwag

I made a mp3 -vcd with the 352x240 template and I added jpegs- but it didn't work very good, green blocks all over. I resized all the jpegs so the width & height was a multiple of 8 but I guess it's not that simple, huh? What resolutions can I resize the .jpg file to while keeping the aspect ratio reasonably close?

Use 704x480 jpegs, which are the standard "stills" resolution for VCD's.

-kwag