No idea why I didn't bump into this earlier. iVCD isn't bad for making VCDs on Macs, but still had a few rough edges.

Just as nice, but $40 less, is Burn, a Free as in No Money app on sourceforge:

Made your own movies and want to share them with family and friends? No problem. Burn can create a wide range of video discs. From VideoCD to DVD-Video discs. And DivX discs to fit more of your videos on a disc.


Works well, and so far hasn't had any trouble converting my movie files from their original format to an mpeg for VCD.

The only catch is making sure each of your movies is 64 minutes or less (I believe that's about the max VCD size. You might double check me). To make longer videos into VCD sized chunks, I'm using splitmovie from QTcoffee. Quicktime will split movies by itself if you pay for Pro, but I paid for Pro for QT 6 and am [neurotically] still a little upset that that didn't translate to 7, not even as a discount. So instead of firing up OS 9, I installed this QTCoffee mess.

Here's the command line you'll need:
splitmovie -o originalMovie.mov -self-contained -no-fast-start -duration 64:00 vcdReadyMovieName.avi

And voila... you'll have files named "vcdReadyMovieName-1.avi" on up, as many as are needed.

Kinda a dumb format, I know, but cheaper to burn two CDs than a DVD, and then you can tote movies to watch on most DVD players. There are some big blocks every so often, especially, it seems, when there's lots of black, but overall I don't get too broken up with the quality.