I got a Pinnacle DC-10+, capture a video (from vcr vhs), the result is a file named *.avi ........... and I try to convert this avi file to mpeg1 (vcd standar), but when I open the TMPGenc 2.54a Plus and I try to open the avi file captured ......... surprise .... a little window that says: cannot open file or unsupported.
Can anybody help me?, please.

I have almost the same problem... when i open the *.mpg file created by TMPGenc(2.5), i have audio but no video is shown. The window is all black, and the audio plays normally. What can i do to fix this?
---Is there another way to compress a Pinnacle's DC10+ (*.avi) file so i can put it in a cd? I don't care so much about quality as long as i get a nice video reproduction at the monitor. Any help would help. Thanks!

Hi - I am new at this. I did make a movie tho First i download a movie from KaZaA (The wedding planner) then onto TMPG and then burned it to a cdrw using Nero - everything worked really good and I put the cd in my dvd player on my tv and it is working but it does not look very good - the picture quality is horrible - when people move it is like going too slow - any way to make it look better????? I would love to make a more movies but if I can't make them look better than this then I will just buy the dvd's that I want instead. I would like them to look like my dvd's or vhs tape I buy from the stores - any way I can get the picture to have better quality???? If so - please let me know!!! Not sure what you need to know - I went thru the directions on VCDHelp.com and did everything like it said and yes I did get it to work finally and was happy about that - just thought it would look better!

Thanks a lot
Rita

use noise and sharpen filter

noise to around 20 and 2
sharpen to around 30 each

allso if your divx is under 100 megs not much youc an do going to look like crap
if your running 300 megs it will look ok with filters anything over 300 should come out nice.

make sure you use 2pass mode and use 2 cd's try uses 128 sound and 23fps

(because souce going to have crapy sound and low fps anyway so will give you more space for better video)

basicly what you put in is what you get out, to have a good quality vcd you have to have a good quality avi .And there are variables the standard vcd template isn"t going to give you the best quality ..The number one thing you can do to make you vcd"s look good is to raise the bitrate, When i do vcd"s I have the bitrate at 1650 kbs and i get 60 minutes on a disk....

The quality of downloaded movies aren't really good enough for converting to VCD. You should be ripping your own from DVD. This will improve the quality a lot.
Really the quality of standard VCD isn't that great and when using 80min cd's it makes sense to up the bitrate as bitrate is related to the output quality.

Do as Minion says and up the bitrate to around 1650 kb/s for a 2hr movie, if the movie runs for less, lets say about 90 - 100 mins then you could up the bitrate to 2000k/bs. This will improve the quality dramatically.

Download yourself a good bitrate calculator such as this one to find out how much bitrate you can set for a movie.
http://www.tomzavodny.cz/program/bitcalc/VideoCalc.zip

If you need info on how to change the bitrate once you have selected the VCD template just type 'unlock.mcf' in the search bar above.

ASHY

I am very dissapointed with the quality of mpg1 (vcd) and mpg2 (svcd) I am getting. Although there is no interlacing visable, it looks pixelated when there is movement.

This is after using SmartRipper - DVD2AVI - TMPG to rip a dvd... Can someone email me a sample of either (just a clip). It just seems based on what I have read that the quality is supposed to be as good as VHS. Well not from what I am seeing. There is no pixelation on VHS tapes. Although when previewing in TMPG it doesn't look too bad. Well thanks again in advance,
And thanks Ashy for the newbie faq.
(oh the results look very close to Clad Dvd - TMPG)

< There is no pixelation on VHS tapes>

well vhs doesnt use compression :)

make sure you use twopass allso dont try to put one movie on 1 cd use 2 cd's or 3if long long movie if you can make a xsvcd (if source is dvd)

allso set the audio to 128. free up some more video byterate check out www.vcdhelp.com

The quality of SVCD when done correctly is far better then VCD or VHS.
The movies I create are all SVCD and are pretty close in quailty to the original DVD and only use 2x 80min disks. There is very little if any evidence of blockiness in high action scenes, but I use CCE for MPEG2 encoding and have a pretty complicated way of doing things which I wouldn't recommend to a beginner.

I have sent you some of the templates I use for TMPG which should improve your quality.

ASHY

ASHY
Could you also send me your templates for VCD and SVCD? Thanks~NewtronX :o)

Check mail.

ASHY

Thanks,
Just wondering why the svcd templates all make 480 x 480 pixels? Is that correct? I think the regular vcd (which I would love to stop using) is 325 x 224??? Don't have it in front of me. Thanks so much for all of your help guys. You seem to know much more than the FAQ writers.

Ashy
I have had the same experience as Heath could you also send me these settings also for Tmpge? I'm trying to transfer motorcycle racing from VHS and as you can imagine this really fits into fast panning/blocky problems and I have just about tried everything.

I have managed capturing frames at 25fps YUV9 640x480 without dropping any frames. If I do this for one minuet and burn to VCD it looks fine. When I go over 2.5mg I get the message "cannot write to capture, disc maybe full, date rate too high".
I'm using Windows Me with 256mb of memory and 15gb Hard drive. Winth Wintv pci-pvi.

So I'm still on the lookout.

Brian

Thanks,
Just wondering why the svcd templates all make 480 x 480 pixels? Is that correct? I think the regular vcd (which I would love to stop using) is 325 x 224??? Don't have it in front of me. Thanks so much for all of your help guys. You seem to know much more than the FAQ writers.

Do you mean 2.5gb or 2.5mb?
If it's 2.5gb it could be the codec you are capturing to as it may be limiting you to 2gb captures, but your capture software should be able to overcome this problem by using sequencial capturing.

If it's 2.5 mb then I have no idea except try a different codec or change the capture software you are using.
I can point you to some excellant software which I use if you require.

If you are capturing to AVI you should be capturing to YUY2 format.
This is the native format of your card and any other format you choose has to be converted first internally by the card. This will give you better captures and lower CPU usuage.

Also check your drivers. If you are still using the old VFW drivers then get rid and download some WDM drivers for your card. These drivers will improve your cards capturing ability.
Tell me your card and I will point you in the right direction for some better tweaked drivers.

Check your mail for the templates.

ASHY

Thanks,
Just wondering why the svcd templates all make 480 x 480 pixels? Is that correct? I think the regular vcd (which I would love to stop using) is 325 x 224??? Don't have it in front of me. Thanks so much for all of your help guys. You seem to know much more than the FAQ writers.

strange I only wrote that once, sorry i hate that

ASHY I would love to see your vcd and svcd templates as well as xvcd and xsvcd... this post has my correct e-mail... if not icupn_icupn@hotmail.com ... thanx in advance... btw I love this board... I learn alot just by reading...and like the fact that I can answer about 25% of the questions asked... I think I will be around for a bit learning and helping

Hello Ashy, could i get an email copy of those templates to. thanks :)

jeremy.public@hotpop.com

Hello Ashy, could i get an email copy of those templates to. thanks :)

jeremy.public@hotpop.com

Thanks Ashy,
I hope the requests your getting are not driving you mad!
I do mean 2.5GB and I'm not too sure what drives I'm using or how to look as I'm still new to all of this. I have only just got WinTV PVR-PCI but maybe you can point me in the direction of these drives you recommend and I'll do the research.

Many many thanks
Brian

Actually Brian the Hauppage drivers are pretty good, but with my WinTV go card they only let me capture at 640x480, which upsets me because I know the card can capture at 768x576 without a problem.

I don't understand why Hauppage have done this, so I use third party tweaked drivers to overcome the problem.
I'm not sure if you will have this limitation with your card, but you should be able to capture at at least 640x480.

Your card uses a different chip, so I'm not sure these drivers are suitable for your card, but I have looked at the original drivers and are similar so they should work.

I have checked the Hauppage driver site and it seems your drivers are VFW drivers. To check which sort of drivers your card is actually using go to device manager and look under sounds,video and game controllers and you should see your drivers listed. They should say either VFW or WDM in the title.

If you would like to try the capture software and drivers I use then check this link.
http://www.iulab.com/index.shtml

ASHY

Ashy,

Any chance you can post me those templates as well?

Cheers,

Graham

i think ive learned how to encode the simple files and turn them into vcd. ive downloaded many programs, such as goldwave, ac3 filters, virtua dub, avi to vcd to name a few. but i still cant change the 'odder avis' to make a vcd. for example what would one do with this? audio MP3,56 kBit/s, 24,000 Hz, Stereo
video 352 x 288, 27273 Frames, 12.500 Frames/Sec, 44 KB/Sec, Unknown Format.
these things play in media player but im not sure how to change everything.

with that file I think you would extract the audio to wav with a higher bitrate and at 41000hz then encode with the pal vcd template at 25fps,I don"t do hardly any pal movies so I"m pretty lost when it comes to pal but i have encoded a few 12.5fps files useing the pal template and they turned out ok...

Bite the bullet and get a dvd-rom then you won"t have to deal with wierd frame rates and unsupported audio or even avi files.and you won"t have to wait forever to download a movie that you don"t know if it is the movie they say it is or if the movie is bad quality or any of those problems that come with downloading and encodeing movies from the net..Ripping DVD"s usualy goes without a hitch and with awesome quality.You can probably buy one for about $50us.The quality i get with my super vcd"s is awesome i can"t tell the differance between the svcd"s and the original dvd"s unless I use the zoom feature on my dvd player and I can see some pixelation on the svcd at 2 times the size,and the pixelation starts on the dvd"s at 3 times the size...anyway get a dvd-rom ,you won"t be sorry....

Whenever I use the "Merge & Cut" feature to splice together some pre-made
mpegs (that were made mpegs by TMPGEnc), there is a slight "blip" sound at
the join parts. Is this a fault of TMPGEnc, or is there any way to stop
these sounds? They're just a soft little blip and not too annoying, but
they're not present on the individual mpegs...

don't use merge and cut..... use the source range filter to encode the exact portion you want.... this will work great for cutting... for cutting and merging mpeg files together (VCD MPEG-1 only) use a new program called MyFlix .... this program is awesome... it understands mpeg-1 and will always create compliant files... I use this whenever an encode fails and instead of redoing the entire movie.... I pick up where I left off and merge them in MyFlix .... I always use tmpgenc to cut them...by encoding them with a source range...there is no need to cut... the only time I used the cut function was when i had a 1 sec glitch that tmpgenc or my dvdplayer could get past.... I have never had any problems with this program and reccoment it for all vcd cutting and merging projects... to avoid more wasted time... try using source range and batch encode in tmpgenc... happy encoding

I have to use Merge & Cut because the pre-made mpegs were not from the one
original video source... so is there a way to stop the blips?

if you have compliant vcd mpg files.... do not use tmpgenc to merge them.... use MyFlix ... It is a program that is available for trial download... ftp://64.91.224.75/M2-edit-pro-testdrive.exe there is the site.... they also have a mpeg-2 editor.... but I haven't tried it...if anyone tests this let me know... there is a tutorial on how to use MyFlix at http://www.vcdhelp.com/webflix.htm ..... happy merging

messed up...the link sent was for mpeg2 editing... the link for MyFlix download is ftp://64.91.224.75/myflix_win32.exe sorry about the mixup.. happy merging

Simply make sure you click the 'Correct' button before you merge and this should solve your problem.

ASHY

How can I encode with TMPGenc from a DVD file (.vob) to VCD PAL?

You have to get "dvd2avi" to make a "d2v" project file and a wav file from your vob files and then you load them in "tmpgenc" and encode...dvd2avi is a freeware program......

there is a really good tutorial...quite a few of them...check out www.vcdhelp.com/sefy

Every time I capture using Wintv PVR-PCI I get the message "cannot write to capture, data rate too high or disc full" This is after ten mins of capturing without any frames being lost, and out of 15gb of hard drive there's only around 2.5gb used.

Any Ideas

I get the same thing with my "hauppauge win tv" what you got to do is lower the bitrate that you are captureing to,that is what worked for me....wow no dropped frames you must have a fast cpu, I drop about 15% of the frames.....

I've been trying to convert an MPEG2 file into a Video CD non standard. The output works all the time but theres a small important flaw, It completes the process only 50% of the mpeg2. In other words the output is 18:11 secs when it
should be 36:22.

What am I doing wrong !!!!

Good news:With the existing output I am able to see it on my APEX but I really would like to have the other half.

When I create a VCD mpeg, it plays fine once it is written to CD and played back on my DVD player, but when I play the file, (not the CD) on my PC, it jerks. Is there a reason for it.

Thanks

Ken

What is the story of SpicyComet? Does it do what it says it will?

No it's a con. It creates VCD's using free tools. One of them is TMPG.

ASHY

Alright... I have a few questions and some problems, maybee someone here can help.

1. I have (in the past) used clad dvd to rip the 2 files (audio + video) needed to create video cds. The dvds that get ripped are NTSC and have interlacing. When I use TMPG I use an even interlace filter and it plays back a little better in the preview window. I don't bother to crop accept for the widescreen films (but forget about that)... Anyway my final results look "pixelated" it seems as though the even filter is not working properly... and I emphasise "seems".

2. I was searching extensivley on the subject, and was wondering if anyone here knows the best way to go from dvd to 2 vcds? I noticed in an earlier post by Ashy that a program called Smart Ripper is the best for actually ripping the dvd.

3. When you rip with Smart Ripper you are left with 6 or 7 .vob files. How can you use these?

4 What ever I am doing now is obviously not the right thing... Please help me. I am sure this post will be beneficial to more people than just myself.

Most of these programs have no manual or little faqs that don't cover the real issues. Please Help.:)

Many thanks in advance for any information or insight!!!!!

http://www.vcdhelp.com/sefy/?id=ClassicalGuide.html

See this guide, just skip the bit on chapters it's not necessary.

ASHY

baby bug

TMPGEnc Plus-2.54.37.135

wizard mode click on svcd-film in the info its 29. fps should say 23.fps
like it used to be.