Introduction

Doctor Smith is a special guest at a medical conference, he's there to teach young doctors new techniques and ways to cure people. He has recorded his presentation and wishes to send it to a few hospitals in his area.

John has to go on a business trip, he wants to entertain himself during the flight. He wants to watch some movies on his portable video player.

Both people, fictional or not, have about the same problems. John needs to store the videos in a simple, basic format that a portable video player would easily understand and play. Doctor Smith needs to send the video from the conference to people that have computers in various configurations. He can't take chances and send the video in a format that a doctor with a Mac couldn't see. He also has to consider the fact that some doctors have slow, old computers, not capable of playing high resolution, highly compressed videos.

They both need a standardized video format that would run on almost operating systems, that would be fast enough to play on a portable video player of old computers. They don't need the quality of a DVD or the quality that a modern video codec would achieve.

At this moment the best standard for their needs is the Video CD or the better, less popular Super Video CD standard.

There are plenty of very easy to use applications that are designed for this purpose, to convert a video file to a Video CD or a Super Video CD but do you really have control over the quality of the output? Most applications try to reduce the quality of the output video file, in favor of speed, because usually people are not patient.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create your own Video CD's or Super Video CD's, using a couple of free, professional applications, aiming for the best quality possible. You will also learn how to add subtitles to the video, if desired. The learning curve is a bit steep but once you get the idea, everything will be easy, guaranteed.

Let's move on and see what we are going to work with.

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