Can some give me step by step instructions on how to put a movie that's on DVD onto DVD-R. Thanks! in advance!

There are some step by step manuals at www.vcdhelp.com......

i. Get a copy of Smartripper, and IFOEdit. Open up Smartripper and in "backup mode" copy the DVD to your hard drive.

ii. Go to the video_ts directory that Smartripper created and check how big the DVD is; if it's more than 4.5GB, the DVD will need to be backed up onto two DVD-Rs and I've explained how to do this previously on this BBS. Just go back about ten pages or so. If the DVD's less than 4.5GB, using IFOEdit open up VIDEO_TS.IFO in the video_ts directory.

iii. Making sure that you've taken out your origional DVD from the DVD drive click on play DVD (in IFOEdit).

iv. Check that each chapter plays correctly. If IFOEdit reports that there's something wrong with the file structure and askes if you would like to correct this, click on yes.

v. If ALL the chapters on the DVD play correctly you're ready to burn the DVD-R. If the chapters don't play correctly, or are out of sequence then most likely the DVD's got a complicated structure that Smartripper can't handle; it may be possible to rectify such problems but if you're new to backing up DVDs I would't attemp it.

vi. Assuming you're using Nero as the DVD-r buner, copy ALL the files in the video_ts directory on your hard drive into the VIDEO_TS directory that Nero creates in its file browser.

vii. Burn the DVD. That's it.

Griff

Thanks for all your help Minion and Griff !! this is good information and i really appreciate your time you took out to reply back with this information, again thanks guys!!

run wizard, load mpg file, and number of minutes is wrong.
I get 336073 min / 27 sec.
file is actually 54 min / 17 sec.
Running win2k
I think 2.53 is ok, 2.56 TmpgEnc is bad.

Tried simple multiplex, no help.

Any advice to solve problem?

Try to demultiplex the Video source from the audio source. Then load them separately into TMPGEnc. Perhaps you have to convert the audiostream into wav (very big file!).
How to demux: www.vcdhelp.com

this is a bug in the new 2.56 version. I went back to 2.54a and all is well.

-d

Lets share your idea.
What do you think is the Best PC configuration for best MPEG encoding with current hardware available (not with hardward MPEG encoder board)?

Im not sure what you eman by 'configuration'
Since TMPGenc is very processor intensive, the faster your processor, the faster encoding ...a nice wad of RAM doesnt hurt either.

It also depends a lot on your settings in TMPGenc

Have a look at this site to check out if your DVD is compatible for VCD.
http://www.vcdhelper.com/

Nicolas

What I mean is what type of processor, p4 or athlon, single or multiple processors, what type of RAM, DDR or RDRAM and what type of Harddisk or disk system.
What type of combination (configuration) will provide best performance in term of speed and quality.

Well since tmpgenc is optimized for Intel"s and Pentium 3 and 4 you might get a bit better performance then with a Athlon and since it is capible of multi-threading so you can use multiple processors and a whack of DDR-ram is better than sdr-ram so say a dual P4 2.2ghz with say a gig of DDr Ram would give you some killer performance probably encode at faster than real time and with the price of fast computers these days it isn"t to expensive to get a real fast cpu anymore,I just ordered a 1.7ghz Intel with everything accept the monitor and it was $499 canadian which is pretty cheap, and for quality I don"t think it really matters how fast or what kind of system you have with quality just the software the your source files...

As far as I know, there is no dual processor board for P4 yet.
Do you think a dual 1Ghz PIII is better than single 2Ghz P4?
Will RDRAM better than DDR RAM?
I notice that the amount of RAM make no different, but will the speed of the RAM make significant different?
How about Harddisk? Speed is important?

DualBoards are a very good choice.
To buy fast RAM and fast HDDs is also a good Idea.

Hi!
I have encoded avi-files to DVD-formate or Video-CD-formate and burned it on a CD through normal cd-burner (not DVD-burner) but can not play it back an my DVD-Player device. Can any body tell me what I should do?

thanks!

1. Are you sure your DVD player is capable of playing VCD's or computer generated CD's.

2. Are you creating MPEG-1 files for VCD and if so are you sure you are creating VCD's with your CD burner.

3. I recommend Ahead NERO CD burner, for burning Video CD's. I have never had a problem with any of the VCD's i have created and I now have almost 1000 in my collection.

4. If this doesn't work for you please feel free to contact me and I will see if I can help further.

One other important point is to make sure that the CD media you are using is compatible with your DVD player.

My Sony DAVS300 for instance is very fussy and only a few brands will work.
Other players will play anything you chuck at them

Check out http://www.vcdhelp.com

and look at the section DVD player compatibility list. See the report other owners have written about your player , most also mention the type of media that works with the player

Ollie which cd's actually work in your player. A friend of mine has exactly the same player and has only managed to get rewritables to work so far, so I would appreciate it if you would post the CDR's you have used succesfully.

Cheers,
ASHY

I was just wondering why when I select the avi. file that I want to convert to mpeg format is not supported and how do I get around it

This beeing newbie question #1 you will find the answer hundreds of times on this site, go to "options" to "envirimental settings" to "vfapi plugins" raise the "Direct Show File Reader" to "2" by right clicking it, and if that don"t work then you need the proper codecs installed on your machine....

I have read posts about people having audio sync problems when converting NTSC to PAL , and I'm a bit puzzled ...

I have never had any audio sync problems ..all I do is

- Decompress the audio to pcm format using avi2vcd
- Encode the resulting large avi to 25 fps PAL using TMPGenc with the toolame audio tool and the ssrc bitrate calculator


I have never come across any audio sync problems .... by reading the posts I should be ....odd

Any ideas anyone - Ashy/Minion/Griff etc ...

The most common problem with ntsc to pal conversions the way you do it is "Choppy Playback" cuz the length of the movie doesn"t change so there shouldn"t be a sync problem, the sync problem comes in when you are trying to do a "proper" ntsc to pal conversion and you have to change the framerate of the avi file and there for changeing the length of the video file which causes major de-sync.When I used to download files off the net I would always just encode every file to ntsc regardless of frame rate and most of the vcd"s would end up with slowdown and speed up chopy playback problem,Tmpgenc actually compencates quite well encodeing to different framerates but it"s not perfect..

Thanks Minion ...but the audio never sounds choppy ..if anything it sounds a lot better than before when I used to use TMPGenc's in built audio functionality.

With toolame and ssrc even if I drop the audio rate to 128 (which I always do now) both the speech and music in my XVCD's is perfectly in sync with no detectable choppiness.

Im not complaning mind you ;)

Minion isn't referring to the audio, but the actual movie playback itself.
The movie will have a slight stutter effect when you do framerate conversions with TMPG. If you haven't noticed it before you will now once you have a closer look. Take a look at something moving across the screen and you should see the effect.

ASHY

Ahhhhh .... now I get it ...
I have noticed that before ... not a big deal, but I guess it would be nice to know how to remove it.

thanks for the help guys

I first came across this stuttering effect within TMPGenc when converting PAL footage to NTSC. I'm not sure if it's the same stutter effect that you're talking about but it kind of looks like the field order has been reversed (which generally only shows up during fast moving footage.) I'm not sure if my solution will work when converting NTSC to PAL but I found by setting the Deinterlace filter in TMPGenc (MPEG Settings -> Advanced) to Double (field), this will double the frame rate, so go back to (MPEG Settings -> Video) and putting the frame rate back to what you want (PAL: 25 or NTSC: 29.97).

Hope that helps.

Hi!

In the past few days there occurs frequently an error while converting from Divx to SVCD. I have tried different versions of TMPGEnc but after some time the error was there again. The only text is: "Error 15152 15152" with an OK-Button. The conversion stops, but after clicking it converts again and produces the error after some seconds again. The error has occured only since 2 weeks or so. Before I converted about 50 movies.

I'm using Win XP, P3-500, 512 MB Ram, Geforce 2 MX

I have encoded roughly 12 vcd's various ways and have a constant problem. When the movie is playing on the dvd player, during the entire film, the audio will be in synch for a few minutes...then the video will get ahead of the audio for a few minutes and back to normal again...it does this the entire length of the film. I first simply encoded the film with TMPGenc then burned with nero. I then changed from nero to VCDeasy...same thing. I then used VirtualDub to extract the audio from the film, encoded both together with TMPGenc and then burned again with VCDeasy. SAME PROBLEM. PLEASE HELP!!!!!!

The "jerkey playback" problem is very common with avi files downloaded off the net at places like "kaaza" cuz many avi files on the net have frame rates that don"t conform to any mpeg standard (12.5fps,14.9fps,20fps)so when you encode them to mpeg tmpgenc has to make up for the missing frames and you get this jerkey out of sync effect, or if you just encode to the wrong frame rate you get this effect,post back with the stats of your avi file and the settings you encoded it with and then maybe we can see if that is the problem...

Well it all seems right to me, the original files all have a framerate of 23.976 and I am encoding it to the same framerate. If indeed it is from downloading from kazaa....is there some way to fix this problem?

Well you should really be encoding those movies to 29.97 fps by adding 3:2 pulldown to the movie unless your DVD player is capable of playing 23.97 movies smoothly which most players don't.

As for the synch problem, it is usually the burning software which is at fault.
Try using Instant CD/DVD 6.5 as this software has been known to correct this problem. Also don't burn above 4x as this can and usually does cause problems.

ASHY

sounds good to me, but won't I then have to deal with the horizontal lines throughout the film while using 3:2 pulldown?

3:2 won't cause any interlacing problems if you do it correctly.
You MUST encode to MPEG2 for 3:2 pulldown to work. MPEG1 VCD doesn't support it.

The easiest way is to select the 'NTSC FILM SVCD' template or the 'PAL FILM SVCD' template then unlock it and change the parameters you wish to change. This will add the correct 3:2 pulldown for you.
If you wish to do it your self then make sure you are encoding to MPEG2 then select the following options:

UNDER THE VIDEO TAB:
Encode mode- 3:2 pulldown when playback
Framerate- 23.976 fps(internally 29.97 fps)

ASHY

I cannot find and open .d2v files in tmpge software. The directory is
blank even If I know the file is there...

Leo

You haven't installed DVD2AVI correctly.
First install DVD2AVI then run it at least once then DON'T move it.
Next copy DVD2AVI.vfp from the DVD2AVI folder to the TMPG folder where the TMPGenc.exe is located.

You should now be able to open d2v files.

ASHY

What is the difference between TMPGEnc Plus from pegasys-inc.com and Tmpgenc from here, both are evaluation versions and share version number 2.56.39.143. If I pay for one am I entittled to use both the same way or is there different licenseing involved?

Please excuse my typeing or grammer english and japanses are my secound languages, I speak korean but I did not see a korean forum so I am posting here.

The differance is that you cannot register the demo version but you can register the "plus" version and the plus version is faster and it has a better 2 pass encodeing function,When you buy "tmpgenc" you just get the registration number for the plus version and there is no way to register the demo....

The Plus version also gives you unlimited MPEG2 encoding once registered.

Excuse me for asking, but when you say that the Plus version is faster, do you know how much faster? I am attemting to rip my first dvd into vcd, and have encountered many read failures, and am also somewhat surprised at the time it takes to covert the vob files. half of a 135 minute movie set to hi quality and noise reduction gave me a rip time of 28 hours for a 68 minute rip. Is this normal for hi quality mode?
I am running an overclocked AMD XP 2000 with 512mg of 2100 memory. I would gladly pay for the Plus version, if the rip times were substantially reduced.

Thanks in advance,
Phil

Either something is wrong with your system or you are loading vob files directly into tmpgenc,I do vcd"s at high quality and svcd"s and xvcd/xsvcd with 704 by 480 resolutions which makes it take like 30% longer than vcd"s and it doesnt take more than 14 hours on high quality and I only have a 800mhz Intel with 512mb sdr-ram, a regular vcd only takes about 6-8 hours, you should be able to encode in close to real time so no more than 2-3 hours for a whole movie, just don"t use the "highest quality" cuz that takes forever, I don"t know how you are encodeing your vob files (dvd2avi or loading directly in)but with your killer system you should be encodeing really fast......

Hello. I get the following error message when trying to open Star Wars EP2 Centropy version (ctp-ep2a.mpg) with TMPGenc 2.56:

File can not open, or unsupported.

But, I can successfully create an SVCD from this .mpg and play it in my DVD player.

Any ideas on why I can't open this file? I wanted to re-encode it because the aspect ratio is off.


TIA

If it is a mpeg 2 file then you need the "mpeg2 plugin" installed on your system so "tmpgenc" can open your mpeg2 file and de-muxing the file and loading the audo and video seperately can sometimes get it loaded when you have problems loading mpeg2 files when you do have the plugin installed...

Thank you.

Where can I get the mpeg2 plugin? I don't see at your site.



Thanks again.

I'd like to know too:) i have a bunch of mpeg2 videos id like to atlest convert to anouther format so i can use them with things.:)

I found a the "mpeg2 file reader" had to serch a bit but you can get it here
http://www.vcdhelp.com/tools.htm .........

This seems to be the best one.
http://www.plmovies.com/mpeg2codec_installer.zip

The other alternative is to open your MPEG2 files with DVD2AVI and create a project file then open that in TMPG.

ASHY

I leave TMPGEnc to encode a vob file (via DVD2AVI project file). I check on it a few times, and all's going well. Then, while I guess it's at 80-something% complete, I come back and the window's not there. Alt-Tab doesn't bring it up, it's not showing in the Task Manager, so I assume it's finished. I go to open the file, and find it's not complete - this one (totally different from the last problem I had) has final length which is 89% the total length.

Nothing shows up in the Event Log so I can't give any more details.