I want to create an SVCD that will play on most late model PC's. I have the Canopus Storm v 1.05 with softencoder and Premiere 6. I've made a 3 minute video to burn to SVCD with my CD-RW. I have Sonic DVDit PE. I don't need graphics or titles at this point, perhaps a start button. How do I put these tools together to do this? I think I want mpeg-2 full screen and I think I should install a viewer on the SVCD in case the PC playing the disc doesn't have one.

PCs aren't fussy about the format of your SVCD - you can have out-of-spec bitrates and frame sizes with no problem. In fact if all you want is playback on PCs (and not standalone DVD hardware) then try for a higher-than-spec bitrate to improve quality.

The main issue for PC playback is having an MPEG2 codec/player available - this will automatically be the case if the computer already has DVD playback software installed (e.g. WinDVD, PowerDVD etc). Since not all PCs will have this, it sounds like a good idea to add the built-in player you mention to the disk. (I havent actually done this myself so I can't assure you that the player will work...)

If you are going to use it just on your PC then dont encode it to Mpeg cuz encodeing to Mpeg will decrease Quality, if you have it in AVI format but the file is to big you would be better off useing s Divx codec cuz the compression is a lot better with smalled file size.....

How big is too big for AVI on a CD? I'm looking at 10 minutes or less. Can I fit a player on there with the file in case the PC doesn't have the right player? And what player would that be, windows media player?
Lastly, what software could I use to burn an AVI to CD? Freeware?