Splitting movies for VCDs?

[David Gerdes]

After a couple weeks wasted because of mpeg2enc crashing on RedHat 7.1
I have backed down to RedHat 6.2, rebuilt all the tools and am
finally having some success with recording VCDs.

I am rather new to working with mpegs and the question that I am currently
struggling with is how to properly split a 2 hour movie onto two VCDs.


Possible scenarios include:


A. Split while running ExtractStream. This allows you to break it
at the tyStream boundaries. problems with this include requiring
2 passes to determine approximate sizes, and starting the decoder
on an arbitrary boundary appears to cause visual problems for the first
few frames. An advantage I would assume is that audio should stay 
pretty well synced at this point.

B. Split the .m2v/.m2a files. I guess you could find an editor(s) to split
these? Problems here include not being real sure of how big the final
files will be, and synchronization could possibly be a problem.
Without an editor, this isn't much of an option.

C. mpeg2enc has the -S option to do the splitting for you, but that 
leaves the audio stream to still be dealt with. Any suggestions here?

D. Split the final mplex'ed .mpeg1 file. I am hoping there is 
an editor which will perform this task. The only problem with this
is you have to first create a large output file before splitting.


I am currently using the method of transcoding on the fly on the Linux
side. And have so far only burned the first half of a show to VCD.

-- 
David