These questions may have been answered before but if anyone knows the answers off the top of their head, I'd appreciate their input. I am using Nero to burn downloaded films/film clips. 1) MPG/SuperVCD - I can convert MPG2 (not MPG1) to Super VCD o.k. and play them on a VCD player. As they both have a download file ext of '.mpg', is there anyway to know by looking at the properties of the download files which are MPG1 and which are MPG2 ? 2) DIVX/AVI - I don't see to be able to convert these at all. Are these the VCD (as opposed to Super VCD) equivalent ? Thanks

Yes. The MPEG 1 will burn directly to VCD, but you need the mpeg 2 decoder plug in if you want to burn them to SVCD. Hope that answers your question.

Thanks but now I'm confused. I thought it was not possible to convert MPG1 to VCD, only MPG2. As both MPG1 and MPG2 have the same file extension (.mpg), how can you tell the difference ?

a VCD uses MPEG1 compresssion. An SVCD is MPEG2. There is some software that will tell you what the video stream is. I forgot the name, but do a search on the web and you might find it. Divx is a form of MPEG4. You need a convertor to convert to another format. Go to www.vcdhelp.com for more information than you will ever need.

Thanks. Just to confirm then... Nero will automatically convert .mpg(1) files to VCD. Nero will automatically convert .mpg(2) files to SVCD. TMPEGEnc (e.g.) has to convert .avi files to .mpg(1 or 2 ?) format first, then Nero will convert this to VCD (or SVCD).

That looks about right. Select VCD when it is MPEG1 Select SVCD when it is MPEG2 TMPEG for file conversion. Then you are off to the races!

To answer question #1, do a Google search for a program called Gspot. It will show you the audio and video properties of your mpeg and avi files.