Making Video CDs

[Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com>]

I'm interested in making my own Video CDs (playable in my VCD-compatible
DVD player).

I have a number of good-quality MPEG-2 movies. I gather I would have to
convert these to MPEG-1. Is there any free Linux software that can do
this?

I read somewhere that a Video CD is simply a data CD with a particular
directory structure and a set of text files for contents, menus, and so
on, in addition to the MPEG-1 movie files. So can I just write the text
files by hand and burn the files to a CD-R to create a working Video CD?

(My DVD player can handle audio CD-Rs, so I cross my fingers and hope
that it will accept a Video CD-R too.)

What tools are there for working with an ISO-9660 image file on Linux?
How does one create an empty ISO-9660 image file? I gather once such a
file exists, you can just mount it and then treat it like any other
writable filesystem.

Thanks,

Craig