Normally I just do a single pass, keep the res at 358x288 and (if I remember) use a bitrate calculator for the video, but that's from bootleg VCD's and this time I have a nice source to work with, an original German VCD (English language), widescreen, the clue to the title is in my nick. It claims to be uncut but still looks a bit short to me, but it has loads more gore than the UK version.

Is this acceptable? I don't see the point of changing the res, if it's 358x288 on the source then surely increasing it would just result in a blocky image? And because I encode the 2 disks to xvid and then just join the 2 xvids together a 2-pass won't work.

You could always extract the mpg's from the VCD and then join the two files, THEN xvid encode them at 358x288

I'm not sure I've answered the right qeustion here though, is that what you wanted answered?

I think so, yeah I'll try that.

How do I join the 2 files? I tried a dos copy /b and this joined them but vdubmod would only read up to the end of the first file. I can't see any way of joining them in vdubmod as the append video segment option is greyed out when processing vcd. Do I need another app to join them?

You can use tmpgenc to join the Mpeg files using the mpeg tool option.

God only know where on the menu it is though, I'm at work and I can't check

That's done the trick Once again BIG thanks to PCA

I've completed my rip, only problem is that I told vdubmod to do a 2-pass xcid with a target size of 716,800KB = 700MB. It actually produced a 745MB rip I can't use gknot as the source is mpeg so over to you, would ppl prefer this oversized rip or I could re-rip 1 pass and see how we go from here. The VCD is not brilliant quality, despite being an official release it looks like it's taken off a scratchy old VHS.

I would take mpeg3cat and then reencode with mencoder. Gave me some nice results.

But I'm using windoze

You did not specify your OS before.