August 11, 2004

Curious (and frustrated) George: Porting a SVCD.MPG file from PC to Mac.

A friend of mine wants me to do some work on a series of SVCD.MPG files. He is England, I am in Canada, so he is sending the file in chunks from his PC (WinXP) to my Mac (OS X 10.3.4) in the format [filename].SVCD.MPG.001 - .002 etc. I can't access or join the file. QT and iMovie give me QT errors ("invalid file type" and parsing problems in iMovie (error -2048) respectively). I have tried numerous utilities in both OS 9 and X. I am also new to this an have no idea what I am doing. I can view the clip in MPlayer but that won't allow me to save or export. So my questions are 1) How do I join the chunks and 2) How do I view them? I can provide more details on the errors if that wil help. Any suggestions?

posted by Jerry Garcia 20 years ago
  • I usually hit vcdhelp.com which goes by 80 million different names.. it's a very PC centric site tho. jooc what program split it up?
  • He used hjsplit.
  • Also, whenever I download the files a .mpeg suffix replaces the .001 suffix. Thanks for that site. I will look around.
  • If it is a true SVCD, the file is in MPEG2 format Unless you have the MPEG2 component for Quicktime, neither QT Player or iMovie will work. This component is something you buy, and I am not completely sure if it would let you export. You might try something like Handbrake or other conversion utilities. MPlayer and VLC can see it because they have their own MPEG2 decoders.
  • Thanks alumroot. I had noted the MPEG-2 component in my searches while trying to figure this out, so maybe I'll just spend the $20 and be done with it. All these video formats are a big pain in the ass. There are too many.
  • Try VLC. If VLC doesn't play it, it's either very obscure or Windows Media Format with DRM. VLC also plays files that are split. I'm not sure it can join them though...
  • Yeah, what Jerry said. Start by changing the filenames from .SVCD.MPG.001 to SVCD001.MPG Then perhaps this discussion will prove helpful?
  • Post above should say: SVCD001.MPEG Also check out this page on file formats and translations
  • I second the VLC recommendation. It has been able to play nearly everything I have thrown at it. As for joining the files, fire up a shell and try something nice like: cat SVCD.MPG.* > SVCD.MPG should work nicely.
  • Thanks very much all. VLC indeed plays the files, and I will likely have to get MPEG-2 to be able to work with them. I will try joining them via the terminal.
  • Success in joining the files via Terminal! And I learned a thing or two about Linux in the process. I am still having trouble accessing the files in QT, and as alumroot suggested I probably need MPEG-2. If any monkeys in the know have a couple of minutes I can post the files on my site (10MB each). I am just curious if they are "true" SVCD and if I need to buy MPEG-2.