Hi,
I'm trying to encode Mini DV video on a svcd using TMPEG. The quality seems very high to me, but there is a block noise on very fast scenes.

After reading some post I realize that is a normal problem for Tmpeg, but I still don't understand how to solve.

I try last version, CQ quality, all options checked in quantize tab but not at all.

ASHY said that "high speed scenes always give blockyness in TMPG which is why I personally don't use TMPG for MPEG2 encoding."
Well, what do you use for that then?

Thanks & regards

I'll just clarify what I meant.
I was refering to the blockiness in fast scenes only when the bitrate is at low enough level so that I can fit the movie on two cd's.

It is perfectly possible to remove all block noise from TMPG encodes by increasing the maximum bitrate and moving the quality slider up (by this Iam referring to the constant quality setting), but this will increase the file size and wont fit on two cd's.
The technique I use involves using TMPG as a frame server to Cinemacraft encoder and then use it encode.

The reason for this is that CCE is a better MPEG2 encoder and can produce better quality movies for the file size compared to TMPG and is faster in the bargain.
The only problem is CCE doesn't allow for resizing or have any filters, this is why I use TMPG to frame serve the settings to CCE.

I always use TMPG for MPEG1 encoding and is by far the best MPEG1 encoder out there. Not even CCE can match it's MPEG1 encoding ability.

I have sent you some templates which should improve things in TMPG.

ASHY

I was wondering does TMPG have a resume option if yes where is it??
If no is there one on the way in future version it would be very very useful for people with a less than stable system as my self...;)

Check out:
Question - Error in file still usable? No.20303

ASHY

well, if you want to pause without rebooting (so you can surf, burn cd's, or other cpu intensive stuff), you can just press STOP and leave the Are you sure? dialog box until you are ready to resume in which you would just press NO. That's the best workaround I have been able to get. However, if you have to reboot then I guess Ashy's adivce is required.

mGuru

Hello everyone,

I have a problem multiplexing .m1v and .mp2 files into an .mpg file with Tmpgenc (version 2.53). After multiplexing, I often get the following error: "Warning - xxxx packets cause buffer underflow. Mpeg file may cause error when it played". Does anybody know what this error message means ? The resulting mpeg file seems to play anyway (on the PC), but can I still use it to create a VCD ? Will it work on the VCD player ? Or is there a way to fix the error ? Thanks very much to everybody,

Flavio

Follow these SIMPLE steps>
Into the search bar type: buffer underflow

Now watch the information flood your way.
Simple wasn't it?

ASHY

Thank you, you may not believe it, but I hadn't noticed the "Search" button...
Anyway, I did the research and read a lot of info, but could not find any explanation on how to fix the problem. Can I change any parameters for multiplexing ? Or do I have to re-encode the files ? (If it's even possible, because I only have the .m1v and .mp2 files, no original .AVI or .WAV files).
Thanks again,

Flavio

First of all before you go worrying yourself about buffer underflows, burn the movie first and try it in your player. Theres a good chance it won't affect it at all.

If it does affect the movie, such as the movie stutters or freezes then post back and I'll give you some tips.

You didn't look to hard when you searched I found one of my old posts right away.
Look at this article:
Question - VBV buffer explained. No.19674
http://www.tmpgenc.net/cgi-bin/ebbs/board.cgi?board=tmpgenc&page=9

ASHY

I've been using Dazzle to capture mpeg-1, and some are from video tape that have been dubbed once too often, as there are unstable squiggles on the top and bottom of the picture.

Can I add black bar on the top and bottom to cover over the picture in post-processing with TMPGEnc?

Or zoom in slightly, or another solution from somebody?

As I say these are the tools I now use, I understand if I had a different capture card I can arrange this at the time of capture with Virtual Dub, but that is in the future a little later this year.

I've been using TMPGEnc a lot as I capture high bitrate and make a copy for strict VCD requirements, but there are some tabs I don't understand.

Thanks for reading.
kingsley

Quite simple.
Open TMPG and click the 'setting' button. Click the advanced tab then choose 'clip frame' in the filter options. Find a suitable place in your movie with the slider then use the boxes below it to clip your movie.
When clipping the top and the bottom don't tick the 'Resized image is used to display preview' option.
When clipping left and right then enable this option to see how your final movie will look.

ASHY

Truly very simple.
Worked great.Solved my problem.

Thank you Ashy!

I have been converting MPEG files into avi to work on them in Premire. This has been working fine for me. When trying to do this on one of these files I get the above error. Any ideas?

I have been converting MPEG files into avi to work on them in Premire. This has been working fine for me. When trying to do this on one of these files I get the above error. Any ideas?

help all i want to do is take the movie i ripped to my hard drive than convered to an avi with easydivx and burn it to my dvd burner. i used ths program tmpgenc the wizard came up i picked 4.7 gig dvd chose my avi file left audio file blank because its inside the avi file.and 3-hr later got mpeg file with no sound. how do i get sound with the wizard? i want to make a dvd. thanks........

Your sound problem is due to the fact that you didn't put any thing in the audio field.

It doesn't matter if the audio is already in the avi. You must put the avi in both the Video and Audio boxes. If TMPG didn't load it automatically then the audio in your Avi is probably not compatible for some reason with TMPG (may be ac3)
Try to load the avi again and make sure the audio box is filled with the avi this time.
If it wont allow you to open the avi in the Audio box you will have to extract it to a wav and use that as the audio source.

ASHY

hello,
the same ocurred to me, i converted an avi file to mpg for vcd and there is no sound on the encoded version. later i checked if the audiofile was loaded automatically or not, it was! then i started to go the way through again, used the project wizard, checked for source range, while determining the range i had checked for "display audio" and guess what: there was no sign of any audio signal the whole lengh of the movie through. but the avi has sound. i can play it in wmp or divx playa and hear sound, in tmpgenc it just seems to be not there.
can anyone help ?
thank you

kind regards
norman

Only one way around it.
Extract your audio to a wav file with virtualdub and use that as your audio in TMPG.

ASHY

Hi there, I'm new to TMPG Encoder.

I've been recording AVI files from video capture using the "MGI VideoWave 4" software that comes with the Dazzle DVC-80. The AVI files look and sound good when I play them back.

When I try to encode them, even small ones (a minute long), it does 99% of the encoding, then comes up with "An error occurred when audio was decoded.". When I play back, I get audio ok, but there's occasional distortion and it's not at all synched with the video.

Why does it say "audio was decoded"? Is my AVI file encoded somehow? (I had thought AVI was raw and not encoded - certainly the file sizes are very large.)

All media files are encoded in some way be it raw avi or raw audio or otherwise.
I think you are getting confused with compression.

Try to extract your audio to a wav file with Virtualdub and load that into TMPG as the audio.

ASHY

Yep, I definitely was getting those two mixed up (encoding & compression).

So I tried downloading the latest version (2.54 - I had been using 2.53). This didn't have the error, but the result was the same - the video and audio are out of synch. I tried a separate audio file (a .wav) as you suggested, but that didn't help.

The audio actually sounds fine, I think I might be missing a bunch of frames on the video. I know that when the capture occurred it said it was dropping a few frames. But the AVI played fine (in, for instance, Windows Media Player). Is WMP filling in by repeating frames, and the compression simply omitting them?

If the audio is in sync with the original avi then it should be possible to sync the MPEG.
Is the audio not in sync the same all the way through the movie or does start off ok and then desync later on?

Your desynchronization is probably due to your dropping frames or a few may have become corrupted. MPEGS aren't as forgiving as AVI where sync is concerned and are more susceptible to corrupt frames.

Run the avi through the latest virtualdub to scan for bad frames.
I also want you to find out the lengths of the Video and the audio of AVI file separately
Post back the results.

My advice to you is to capture to a compression format such as Divx 4.12 or 5 at the highest quality setting if you have a decent processor.

Your dropped frames are likely due to your hard drive not being able to keep up with the data flow.
Uncompressed avi is very hard to capture without dropping frames.

ASHY

The dropped frames are mostly at the beginning, and the audio is therefore behind the video for most of the segment.

Hey, VirtualDub didn't detect any "bad frames", but loading and saving the AVI in VirtualDub, then using that output for TMPGEnc, produced a synchronized MPEG! So the problem's basically solved... Not a nice solution, though, since it means I'll need room on my drive for 2 AVI versions of whatever I want to encode... I need better capture software, I guess.

I have a good processor (Athlon 1700), and a nice RAID-0 set of drives on a Soyo DragonPlus motherboard, so my hardware should be up to this.

For capture, I've got an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder, but the software that came with it was giving me lots of pain. All my captures had mild audio static. I tried capturing directly with VirtualDub, but apparently the Radeon doesn't support Windows video capture format. Then I tried a simple Dazzle DVC-80 that plugs into a USB port. It does pretty AVI captures, but apparently they're missing frames in this non-friendly format.

I've been trying to get a nice VCD capture setup going for a couple months (off and on), it's been very confusing.

By the way, thanks for all your incredible help and advice, ASHY.

To get around the problem of having two large AVI files on your drive, if thats the way you want to do it, just load your avi into Virtualdub and frameserve to TMPG. This will be the same as creating another file, but without the quality loss or the extra space required and was going to be my next suggestion, but you found your own rounabout way of doing it.
Well done.
For more info on frameseving using Virtualdub check out http://ww.vcdhelp.com

ASHY

Ok, I've finally figured out how to do a decent AVI capture - I use my ATI hardware with the MGI VideoWave 4 software that came with the other hardware, and I'm no longer losing frames. I'm trying to convert my old beta videotape collection to VCD in anticipation of my beta machine someday dying.

One thing I tried was an episode of "Doctor Who". The opening credit music is noticably more "screechy" in the MPEG output than in the AVI input. All my other problems are gone - everything's synched up and the video is as good as any 352x240 MPEG I've seen. But the sound is really annoying. It's sharper in the program as well, but it's really bad during the opening credits.

So, is this likely to be an underlying problem in the source AVI, like the video problem was, or is this some other conversion issue? Would it help to separate out the sound as a .wav? If so, why would doing that help?

Hmm, the problem seems to lie in converting the audio stream, whether in TMPGEnc or in VirtualDub. Apparently my AVI audio is 16,000 Hz, and converting that to 44,100 Hz makes it sound buzzy.

I followed the instructions at VCDHelp for converting the audio stream to 44,100 and the resulting WAV sounds bad too. Is there a safe way to do this conversion, or do I need to go back to the capture tool and recapture with better sound?

Firstly I would start capturing at 44100 for your audio, and choose mono as I guess this is what the source is, otherwise the quality will be terrible.

Yes your right the problem is the samplerate conversion.
TMPG's samplerate converter isn't too good.
A better option would be to load your avi into Virtualdub and extract the
audio to a wav. Choose full processing mode under 'Audio' and click 'conversion' then change the samplerate to 44100 and make sure you tick the 'high quality' box then click 'File' and choose 'save wav'from the menu.
Use the wav file that is created as your audio in TMPG.

ASHY

Yeah, that does it! I did everything right except for checking the "High Quality" box, which I hadn't noticed. And good point about the mono sound, no sense wasting bandwidth on a second track for a mono tv show.

I'll have to do some more playing around to get my system to capture in 44.1kHz.

Thanks, again, ASHY!

If youv'e got a Windows 2000/xp system then check out this excellant capture software.
It's the best I've ever used. It's a bit tricky at first, but you soon get the hang of it.
http://www.iulab.com/index.shtm?iuvcr/about

ASHY

There are also some drivers on the site which may work with your card.

ASHY

After converting serveral Avi (DivX) Files to mpg I got with all the same problem.
The sound seems to be fine, but the screen stays black from the beginning (during converting and later on my DVD Player or also in WinDVD).

I read that there seems to be a problem with DivX 5, is that the point?

i can understand your frastration it took me almost a week to solve this problem, (i copy the answer from anther quastion on this web page)
Go to OPTIONS -> Enviromental setting -> VFLAPI Plug-in...and then Right click on where it says "Direct show file reader" or "avi vfw compatibility reader" and it will give you an option to raise the preference of it.....I have it up to "3" and It displays the preview...and its the same thing with sound.

good luck

I tried choosing an mpeg as my video source and it said I had missing .dll files. Anyone had any problems with this?


Steve

If it's the P3Package.dll or whatever just download TMPG again from a different source.

ASHY

I have tried twice to convert a certain avi file to mpeg. It has stopped at 89% both times. I received an error message of Illegal floating decimal point calculation order. Can someone translate that error message to English for me. Just joking. I'm not a computer guru as you can tell. Help, please.

Rachel, aka WickedBitca

You might be asked what the details are of the input file and your output selections in TMPGEnc, and your PC info (processor type/speed, windows version, and memory, and how big your output file is getting in Gigs - defrag the drive and have plenty of room available?).
What is the title of the box that gives the error display?

k

If it happens at the same spot every time then it is corrupted frames in your avi file,to get around this you will have to disable the "floating point" encodeing system, do this by go to your "cpu" tab in "enviromental settings" and un-tick all the boxes, then go to the "quantize matrix" tab in the "settings" and un-tick everything there. this will solve your problem but it will take a lot longer to encode.What would be easier is to use the source range and encode the last part that you didn"t get and then join the two parts with the "merge& cut" feature in "mpeg tools".......

i have started getting this same message at 0% when i try and open ANY file (AVI, MPG, MOV). I will try tinkering the Quantise Matrix but if anyone can - Help! I am using a Pentium3 @800mhz and 512Mb RAM and it used to work fine. The same files work on other, lesser machines... Help!

After an error while creating an mpeg, is it possible to begin again where the last try left off? I was at 96% and it takes me a couple hours to make an mpeg out of an avi. If I can start where I left off, or can't please help.
'kathleen

Load your MPEG movie into TMPG then click File>preview.
Move the slider to the very end, just to be sure click the arrow a few times then note the frame count in the top left.
Then load your avi again and click setting>advanced and tick the source range filter then double click it.
In this box type in the frame count into the 'start frame' box then click 'move to start frame' and then 'set start frame'.
Move the slider to the end of the movie and repeat the above steps to set the end frame of the movie then encode.

Finally merge the two together by using MERGE&CUT in MPEGtools and adding your files making sure the beginning of the movie is first in the list to give you a full movie.

ASHY

One other point click the 'correct' button before merging otherwise you may get a squeak were the files are joined.

ASHY