Up until now I have always outputed DVDs for my clients but now I have a client that wants their 5 minute presentation to run on a CD-ROM.

My question is:

If I create an MPEG-1 file and burn the VCD will any computer be able to read the VCD or do the computers need a specific program installed?

DO VCDs created on PC play on MACs?

There are two ways forward with this:

1. create a genuine VCD (check your burn program)

2. create a normal data CD with an MPEG-1 file on there (extension should be .MPG)

Windows should play both discs fine with the Media Player, but
not automatically (although an autorun.inf could take care of this
on the normal data CD probably).

I have no idea how a Mac would behave, but I suspect that it
can play both formats as well without any trouble. How to get it
playing? I have no idea.

The Mac will play an MPEG-1 as well without problems. If you have a Mac and Toast (by Roxio) it will allow you to burn a Dual format disk that will autorun on both a Mac and PC. I use it all the time for my clients.

Thanks Rhett and Rob.

I'm PC based so That won't help.

I think I'm going to make a master VCD and then copy it to a hard drive and add an MPEG-1 file to the folder and then start burning additional CDs so that both the VCD program and the native MPEG-1 is on one CD.

Last question does anyone have an autorun script for Macs and PCs that I can alter for this project?

For PC the following should do:

1. make sure you can see file extensions (ie, .txt etc.), if not, enable this first

2. create a file called autorun.txt

3. edit this file in notepad and add the following content:

[AutoRun]
shellexecute=file.mpg

4. rename the file to autorun.inf and put this file together with the file.mpg (or whatever you named it) in the root of the CD

That should do the trick. Ofcourse this only works if the user has
autorun enabled (I haven't for example).

Mac's do not ship with anything that will play VCDs. They will play MPEG-1 files, but by default they do not play VCDs. Users need videolan or something similar to do that (the Mac DVD player does not work with VCDs and QT won't open a .dat file). So if you want it cross-platform without issues, I'd say make it just an MPEG-1 file on a CD and maybe create an auto.inf file for the PC side. For the Mac side you need to format the disc a special way to do an autostart feature, so I wouldn't bother.

Thanks everyone.

I'm going to deliver PC based VCDs with the MPEG-1 video file encoded also.

For the Mac users, I'll place the video online in QT and provide the link.