I have it working but i am unhappy with the audio quality after the conversion.
Also i have seen the Audio go out of sync when encoding programs longer than one hour.

I am not home at the moment but here are the simple steps that i do. I will fill the gaps in this when i get home this weekend.

Make sure you have installed the Eelcard mpeg player. (If you register it you will get rid of the watermark in the top righ hand corner)

1. Using ExtractStream extract x.m2v and x.m2a to you PC.
2. Using the TMPGEnc tools mux the x.m2v and x.m2a into x.mp2. (This step is optional but i have better luck with encoding by doing this).
3. Select the source video file to x.mp2 set teh source audio file to x.mp2.
4. Set the output file to be x.mpg
5. Click load settings and select "Extra\unlock.mcf" to enable full configuration abilities.
6. Click Settings to start changing the current encoding session settings.
7. On the Settings tab select "MPEG-1 VCD".
8. On the Advanced tab select clip frame and then double clik it to get to the clip frame dialog.
10. Keep on incrementing the left value until the green bar disapears (about six i think).
9. You can save these settings by clicking save.
10. Click start to start the encoding session.
11. Go for a beer. Cheers!

I will fill the gaps in the HOWTO when i get home on the weekend.

I've you may also want to download the Elecard video player - I think it's www.elecard.com

This always definately plays ExtractStream extracts regardless of Windows Media Configurations, codecs installed, etc.

I've done two VCDs now. The steps were really convoluted because of issues with mplex under Linux and the two-gig file limit it seems to want to stick with.

1) ExtractStream recoding off Tivo via NFS to Linux box. ~ 3 gig or so, for an hour
2) Reboot to Win2k, extract the video and audio from the linux drive using explore2fs onto an NTFS drive that can hold > 2gig
3) Tmpegenc it down to VCD using Tivo-vcd.mcf

(note, the config that comes up is *wrong* with that. You need to go into Settings onto the Advanced tab and under "Video Arrange Method" make sure its set to "Full Screen" not "Full Screen (keep aspect ratio" or the resulting VCD will be encoded such that you'll end up with black bars on the sides of the video and you'll be able to see the green line)

I did this x2, so I ended up with the 600 meg or so MPG files for the two shows I wanted VCDs of.

4) Copy two mpegs to a FAT drive, and reboot to Linux
5) Use GNU VCDImager (look on freshmeat for it) to create .bin/.cue files from the mpegs
6) Burn the cds using CDRDAO onto CDRW (my DVD player won't read CDR discs)

Thats it. Both discs worked perfectly on my DVD player. I encoded both as VCD 2.0 discs, which my Windows player seems to choke on, but from experience in the past I knew my DVD player seemed to be happier with.

I know VCDImager has builds for Windblows too -- I did it under Linux because Windows 2000 blue screens every time I attempt to write anything under Windows. The biggest hassle of the whole thing was tmpegenc reencoding the video. Its aparently not SMP-capable, so it was dog slow. (I've only got 533 Celerons in here x2) 6 hours to convert each show.

Originally posted by dotorg:
If you are going to play the VCD on a "real" player (ie, not on your computer -- a dreamcast, dvd player, etc) you don't need to crop the green bars anyway. Just encode it normally and they'll be just off the screen, because of overscan.