over-burning, subtitles and track titles

more tech notes for my own sanity. Write it down or I’ll forget. note: the “you” in my tech posts is me. I’m telling myself how i did this stuff so that when i need to do it again i can start here.

over-burning in Nero

I don’t know for how long 800MB capacity writable CDs have been around but the other day when I bought my first 10-pack at 4,000￦ I was all pumped and ready to get back home to start burning.

X … no worky.

At first I thought that the CDs were mislabeled. The “not enough disc space” error popped up saying something about 700MB not being enough space to fit my nearly 800MB file. Say what? I though I bought a crap product … until I did some googling …

Apparently just because you own a 800MB CD-R doesn’t mean you can write to it. You need software capable of over-burning. I use CDBurnerXP Pro (it’s free) and by the looks of it, it doesn’t support over-burning like Nero (it’s not free). When viewing the Disc Information with my software it says the total capacity is 702.83MB, however the disc is labeled 800MB. A solution would be to download the trial version of Nero (“1.5 GB hard disk space for a typical installation of all components” sheeish!) but before I decided whether or not to do that I came across something else while googling …

you need a recorder (CD burner) capable of over-burning. Based on the fact that I received an error message when I tried to burn to the 800MB CD using the WindowsXP CD writing tool, I am assuming that my recorder is not capable of over-burning. No firmware upgrade exists for this drive (HL-DT-ST CDRW/DVD GCC4244). So downloading a trial version of Nero may be pointless. But … since I cannot definitively say that my recorder doesn’t support over-burning then maybe I can go the distance … I’ll put it on my list. 1.5 GB is too valuable to me right now … I’ve only got about 4 GB remaining to play with. I guess it would be temporary anyhow since it’d be a trial version and presumably end in the short future and as long as I could remove it completely and get back that disk space, I guess I could give it a go …

this thread from a tech forum was informative: how to burn a 750 mb data to a 800 mb cdr with Nero 6

[UPDATE]

it worked. i downloaded a trial version of Nero and enabled the overburning option and burned a 760,000+ kilobyte file to a 800 MB CD-R. i guess my HL-DT-ST CDRW/DVD GCC4244 is capable after all.


as a side note, the Nero software gave the following warning:

This compilation contains too much data to fit on the disc with respect to the normal disc capacity. Do you want to try overburn writing at your own risk? (This might cause read errors at the end of the disc or might even damage your recorder.) Required capacity: 85:17.68 750MB Total capacity on disc: 79:57.74 730MB (this is a lie) Note: SCSI/ATAPI errors may also occur at the end of the simulation or burning. Even then, the CD/DVD may still be readable but the written data needs to be verified. Click OK if you want to try overburn writing to the disc.

after the burn completed i checked the data on the CD and everything seemed OK and my recorder seems OK too.

subtitles in VLC

Oh, also, to enable subtitles in VLC media player (assuming you have both the video and subtitle file – named the same and in the same directory) then go to File // Open File // then on the File tab browse to your video file, click ok // tick the subtitle options box // click on the Settings box // browse to the subtitles file, click ok. Subtitles should now be showing in your video.

track titles in cda files

oh, something else i figured out today and am sure to forget by the time my head hits my pillow and my eye lids close tonight: Nero is great for burning mp3s for audio cd players (i.e. burn mp3 into cda files). i have a list of 120 mp3s (classical pieces) that came off ~one~ CD that doesn't play on a standard music cd player. for a friend i'm converting the files to cda format and burning to new CDs so she can play the CDs on her cd player at her store. but when Nero burns the track list each track is burned as "Track01.cda, Track02.cda, and so on. this would be fine if i was able to fit all the songs on one cd but that won't be possible as the conversion blows up the original size (apparently) and what fit on one CD as mp3 files will fit on like 6 CDs as cda files. (maybe there is a better way but i don't know it as of yet.) anyway, the problem: on my second and subsequent cds i don't want the naming convention to be "Track01.cda, Track02.cda, and so on because that doesn't actually match up with the song number on that CD. i want the track number to match the actual song number. For example, only 17 songs, or about 90 minutes (800MB CD-R!!), fit on the first CD. the 18th song will be the first song on the second CD so i want song 18 to be burned on the 2nd CD as Track18.cda (because she should be able to cross-reference the song by number to her song booklet), not Track01.cda but Nero does not give the user an option to change or re-order track numbers (they way MS Word allows you to start a numbered list at any number). so i poked around the help documents and found out that there is an "option for writing CD Text. With CD players that support CD Text, the title of the CD, the name of the audio file as well as of the artist appear in the display." so if she has a rudimentary CD player that doesn't have the ability to display CD Text then she'll not be able to cross-reference her song booklet without doing a little math in her head ... and who wants to do math in their head? but if she has one of the nicer CD players, which i'm betting she does, then she'll be able to see the title i included.