When I encode clips in TMPG and import them to my mac and into DVD Studio Pro the clips play okay, but the time code is faulty which means I can't add chapter markings.

Does anyone know how to fix this so that the time code remains correct?

Thanks

hal

I don"t know much about Mac"s but it seems that for some reason your dvd software isn"t reading the header on the file so all i can think of is to use a multiplexor and de-mux and mux the mpeg file on your Mac with I don"t know what software then the header will be rewriten.Maybe the header is different on a mpeg file on a Mac than on a PC or something was lost in the transfer, you could allways author with your PC or find an encoder for your Mac, Just a sugestion..........

I've tried to run the clips through MPEG append to see if that corrects the time code3 issue, but it does no good. The clips show up in DVD studio Pro without any poster frames (this may be the problem instead of the timecode, but I don't know). I like the encodes with TMPG best. They're so much better than quicktime or any other software based mac encoder that I know of.

Still trying to figure it out...

Whats the difference between joint stereo and dual channel???

duel channel is the same as in germany

when a programme is broadcasted over tv, all u have to do is change the audio channel selector, so u can listern but stil watch the same film/tv show,
normally a film their is broadcast in english and german

it was designed for US/UK forces based in germany, it's the same with a dvd, if u bought a dvd in france their would be 2 laungauges english/french in germany english/german, it gives a choice which too listern to.

english is the default laungauge.

joint stereo

no idea sorry

I might be a bit off here but i think "Dual chanel" is best if you have a Mono source ,the dual chanell plays the mono out both speakers, and "Joint Stereo" mixes the left and right sterio chanels into one then plays it out both speakers,I think both these formats are for lower quality audio, like when you have mono or mixed sterio(left & right out both speakers) but if you have a sterio source then I think it is best to stick with useing sterio for the output.....

Here is a little more exact description:
'Dual channel' means that the Left and Right are encoded independently. 'Joint stereo' means that when compressing, it uses similarities between the Left and Right to achive higher quality, which happens but sometimes on the expence of stereo seperation.

'Dual channel' is best when you have two intependednt things on Left and Right, like said above for example, two different languages.

'Joint stereo' is good for low bitrate audio (I assume 112K and below).

Simply 'Stereo' is good for all other things.

If the source is mono then allways encode it in mono, but if you HAVE to encode in stereo (like in VCD) then I think 'Joint stereo' will be the best option for you.

ABS

I agree Dual channel is simply two totally independent channels where no bit sharing occurs as in joint stereo.

Joint stereo should not be used for VCD if you wish to use Dolby Pro logic audio as the mixing will destroy the Pro logic audio information.
Joint stereo is best suited to Music, for example a music video where you could drop the bitrate yet still achieve high quality sound.

Stereo or dual channel is the best choice for DVD rips or any audio which has Pro logic audio. I personally would use dual channel as I think this works best for Pro logic due to the fact there is no cross contamination of the audio between the two channels thus providing better and cleaner storage of the Pro logic data and better reproduction of the audio , but requires more bitrate, but having said this the standard 224 bitrate is usually enough.

Stereo is a good choice, but I still find there is some bit sharing occuring between the channels.

ASHY

I am making a backup of "Who's Afraid of Vriginia Woolf?" and seem to be having an odd issue.

Here is the scenerio:
I am using smartripper to decode the files.
I then use DVD2AVI to create the d2v file.
Then I use TMPGEnc 2.57 to do a 2-pass encoding of the avi file.

The issue is that while doing the first pass in TMPGEnc the reported "Remaining Time:" is hours more than the number of frames that are present. (eg. the system runs out of frames to encode and TMPGEnc continues to tick away for 5 hours.)

My platform is Win2k, dual P3 550's, 392 mb RAM.

TMPGEnc is set to Multi-thread mode.

Any ideas?

I don"t have an idea why you are getting this quite strange problem but I"ll throw a couple things in the air to try and you might find a solution.Try going to the "source range" and mark the beginning and end frame as start and end encode points and see if tmpgenc will read all the frames, another thing to try is to not use the 2-pass encode method, it is widely regarded on this BBS and else were that the CQ encode method is as good and sometimes better than the 2-pass method with less than half the encode time,and you could try turning off the multi-threading and see if that is were the problem is, and lastly you could try makeing a new D2V file with dvd2avi, that has solved a few problems I have had with frame serving from dvd2avi, anyway just a couple things to try....good luck...

Thanks for the suggestions. I posted the same question on the divx.com forum and didn't get too much of a reply. But I did update the post with this:

Just as an update to this post. Here are a few other things that I have noticed:

After TMPGEnc has finished encoding the last frame the "Remaining Time" counter appears to be 50% completed. It then seems to begin decrementing by significantly larger chunks of time. Usually 11 or 13 seconds per second. This means the remaining time seems to tick out in about 27 minutes or less.

A reply to another post on the TMPGEnc forum said to try the following 2 things:

1) Turn off multi-thread support --Didn't have any affect...
2) Hard set the source range to the beginning frame and end frame. --No effect.

So here is my hypothesis:
TMPGEnc, like other encoders, seems to derive the "Remaining Time" from the average number of Frames Per Second achieved by the encoder. My guess is that somehow the 2 processors are making the encoder believe there is only half the fps goin' on, or the remaining time is a function of (total frames / fps) * # processors.

That's my story, and I am stickin' to it...for now...unless someone can help me out with this whole computer programming logic thing that I know nothing about.

Hi,

I've found something strange. I splitted an DivX movie into two parts by using TMPGenc. I used a seperate WAV audio source to be multiplexed with the video file. From first encoded MPEG file, the audio is in perfect sync, till the end (about 45 minutes). The second one is completely out of sync from the beginning. I tried to encode it several times and it still exists. Also when I make short test files at the middle of the movie, I have to adjust the audio delay which is not correct I think.

Some settings and properties:

- Encoding to PAL, SVCD
- Source 23,976 fps, VGA (640x480), DivX AVI v5.x
- Option "Do not framerate conversion"
- Wav audio file (timestreched to fit in a 25 fps movie,
multiplied the original by 0.95904)
- First part: frame 0 to 65150
- Secon part: frame 65100 to end

Thanks,

Marc

Whith files that are out of sync the same amount the whole way through the file you can try to re-sync with a program like "mpeg2vcr" or "BBmpeg" cuz they have an option in there multiplexor to off set the audio to match up with the video, it is a bit of guess work though.....

Hello,

The first 45 minutes split is fully in sync. Why can't TMPGenc only make the first split perfectly in sync, the second part not?

The only way is to encode the full video and spilt it afterwards. This is a lot of work in my opinion.

I thought that the program was able to do multiplexing?

Thanks,

Marc

OOOhhh ,I see your sync problem happens after you cut the movie in half, this is easy to fix use a different mpeg editor, or better yet is to split the avi before encodeing cuz Mpeg files aren"t meant to be edited that is why there are so many problems with editing them, here is a link to a few mpeg editors I would sugest M2-edit pro ...http://www.apachez.net/ go to the Tools section...

Thank you for your reply.

Indeed I loaded the AVI and audiofile in TMPGenc and then I want to split the movie in two MPEG SVCD files. The first part is perfectly in sync then.

Is the MPEG Tool in TMPGenc also a good option?

Thanks,

Marc

reading what u and giff said i was able to over come problems i incountered, this is what i posted

I hope this will help some people when it comes to backing up their DVD¡Çs

I have for the last 3 weeks constantly work on doing my DVD¡Çs and have finally got to this point.

When u are backing up your DVD¡Çs there are 2 ways to do it, 1 involves using myDVD the other not.

Step 1

Use smart ripper to read the VoB files and store them to the HD, when it has id the movie file there is another tab, called ¡Æstreaming process¡Ç click on this, u will now see a number of boxes with normally all ticked, what u need to do is un-tick all bar 2 of these boxes, tick the first 1st and the 3rd box, the first relates to the movie files the second to the audio.

Look carefully if you have 5.1 u may have to tick box 5, but here any way u will see all the subfolders contained with in the VoB files, here is where u remove all the files u will not need e.g. subtitles other audio.

Start the rip process after u have finished in this section, now smart ripper will move the VoB files to a folder u designate, when this has been done DO NOT DELETE THESE FILES UNTILL YOU HAVE CONVERTED THEM TO MPEG !!!! leave them where they are.

If u look in this folder you will see an .info folder, smart ripper has rewritten the base start-up commands for the DVD, DO NOT TOUCH THIS.

Now we are ready to convert to mpeg

Use dvd2avi as the name suggest it can create avi files, you will not be doing this as you are creating a project for TMPEGnc.

Load the VoB files in to dvd2avi

Now do not save as avi, instead save it as a project, this will take about 15 mins, after that within the same folder there is a file called ¡Ædvdname.d2v¡Ç.

Now exit and start up TMPEGnc and open this file, this is where u will be converting it too an mpeg file, load the template and set the outcome to the same folder as the other files (vob/.d2v) yep basically keeping all file within the same folder. Now start the conversion to mpeg.

After xxxx hrs sometimes up to 4-5 u will have an Mpeg file, this is what u will import to myDVD. Do so

Let me just explain what you have done !!

Firstly you have removed audio files u do not need, dus reducing the mpeg file amount, I did the same movie, first time it was 3.57 gigs, the second it was 2.9 gigs, big difference, so when u import it too myDVD and it encodes it, it will fall below the 4.7 gig problem solved, I have now backed up 6 DVD¡Çs nicely.

Secondly after smart ripper stores the VoB files it creates an info file, that tells the dvd what too read, that¡Çs why I suggest u look to see if there are any 5.1 audio files, cause this is where that important information is created.

Option 2

This is using a program called infoedit basically it dose the same encoding with the info file, it stores the VoB/info to a folder, then it will allow you too burn directly too the DVD.

You could also use nero to burn these files to a DVD, all that happens is when u insert it into a DVD it boots up with out any page or chapters, but it works.

You can read more about infoedit at www.doom9.com it has instructions on using it

Hope this helps you all and happy burning
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

thx to u both as now i can do it both ways, so i hope this helps others, do u think i should repost this under 'burning dvd's' etc ????

Nice one mate.
There are a couple of steps which I think are unecessary though.

1. There is no need to create another d2v project file as the latest smartripper automatically creates one.

2. It is not necessary to re-encode the sound track to wav. Simply extracting the Ac3 stream and importing this into your DVD authoring software should be enough and will also preserve audio quality and as I have noticed ac3 files are usually smaller than the equivalent MPEG audio file.

ASHY

Another thing you don"t really need to do if you are doing just "STep#1" you don"t need to go out of your way to dump all the extra audio and subtitle tracks cuz "DVD2AVI" extracts the needed tracks but as Ashy says you don"t really even need "dvd2avi" cuz you get a "d2v" file from "smartripper" and you can extract the english AC3 track with "smartripper" but it seems that you got it down ,Good Man and good luck......

Nice one mate.
There are a couple of steps which I think are unecessary though.

1. There is no need to create another d2v project file as the latest smartripper automatically creates one.

2. It is not necessary to re-encode the sound track to wav. Simply extracting the Ac3 stream and importing this into your DVD authoring software should be enough and will also preserve audio quality and as I have noticed ac3 files are usually smaller than the equivalent MPEG audio file.

ASHY

well it works, after 3 weeks messing around banging my head, i can now finally back up what i need, but as i said without reading your help i would most probally still be buggerd.

thx again, i will keep readng these posts and offering any help if i see it

cya around people

now trying uleaded movie factory, that in itself may bring up new problems, until dvd home producing becomes standard i think their will reman alot of confussion

:):):):0

forgot to mention

mydvd dose not accept ace files so that why i converted them to wav

dvdit or moviemaker will accept ac3

mydvd 4 is reported to accept them, but untill it is released, i have no idea

The simple solution to that would be to use TMPG to mutiplex the Ac3 stream with your re-encoded MPEG movie using the MPEGtools then import into your authoring software.

ASHY

did that

don't work that well

whats best is to seperatly import the wav file, even this is not perfect

another work around was to use 'showbiz' and create a project for mydvd, that helped, but it doubles the time as it is in real time

If you have DVD authoring software that doesn't support Ac3 too well then I would ask for a refund on that software.

It is a requirement by the DVD specs that every DVD must support an Ac3 track and is the standard audio for DVD.

If your software is not living up to this then it should not be calling itself DVD authoring software.
I would send it back and get rid and download a proper DVD authoring program.

ASHY

i agree ashy

i just d/l ulead moviemaker and it was so much simplier to use that mydvd 3.5 looks like i will be getting that after the 30 days

im new at encoding, i tried to encode an AVI file into MPEG. I tried to put my AVI in the Video Source box but an error came up saying "cannot be opened or is unsupported, can anyone help me???

Please use the search engine above to find your answer with the word 'unsupported'.
You will find your answer.

that copy and paste again ashy !!

i spent 2-3 hrs reading past posts

it needs an faq i think

I totally agree. I have asked, but as usual the request got ignored.

ASHY

I'll bet that something is wrong with the file.

I've had the same issue.

Have you tried to open the file in Virtualdub and read the file information ? If it doesn't open there I wouold go to www.vcdhelp.com and check out the listing of tools for editing and fixing files and see if the file can be repaired. Lot of options and products which would work.

I had the same problem too (i think) but resolved it by downloading an older version of the mircrosoft codec which was compatible... mp43? the version# ends in 3688

I'm going to be using my notebook to watch some movies and wonder if the qualityt is better in SVCD or just DivX. I would assume Divx is better because its not converted to a Mpeg yet.

Anyone have advice?

Divx is MPEG, but you are right Divx has a better quality/file size ratio.

ASHY

Hi
Can anyone help I am new to encoding I have ripped a Music DVD of my own so I can watch it at work on my laptop I have encoded it to VCD because my lap top has no DVD drive the problem that i am getting is that the vcd is very blocky I have used the vcd pal template does any one know how to make the vcd better I have got some other vcd's from the NET and from shops and thay are fine please help THANKS

If you intend to watch this video only on your laptop then I wouldn't encode to VCD at all, I would recommend encoding to Divx as this will give you a better quality vs size ratio.

If you still want to stick with VCD then you will have to raise the bitrate of the VCD to increase the quality. This will reduce the blocks, but will also increase the file size accordingly.
Also choosing 'high quality' as the motion search precision setting will give you a better image at the expense of encoding speed.

For more info go to vcdhelp.com and see the guides on creating XVCD.

ASHY

Hi Thanks I will encode to Divx but why is it that other vcd are better than the one's that I encode but thay all have the same bitrate I have tried differant setting but still get lots of blocks more so on the dark parts of the films THANKS

The pre-recorded VCD's you can buy are made with a special hardware encoder which is a proffesional piece of equipment and will have many post processing filters to reduce blocks and improve the image.

The cost of these is quite considerable when compared to a simple software encoder such as TMPG. Never the less TMPG is quite capable of producing MPEGs which can almost match the quality of these hardware MPEG encoders.

It all depends on your source, the bitrate you use and the encoding parameters you set.

Have a look around this BBS for some info regarding the 'Constant quality(CQ)' method of encoding or repost and ask for advice on this.

ASHY

I have been encoding to VCD for some time, and only recently had this problem. In the past when I had out-of-synch problems they were throughout the entire vcd, from start to finish. Now, even when I split out the eaudio, I am having out-of-synch trouble off and on. The movie speeds up and slows down in spots, and the audio stays constant. I end up with audio that is sometimes in synch, sometimes not, and the surges ahead every few minutes. it is really distracting. Anyone else had this trouble? Any idea what I am doing to cause it? The original is fine, and the mpeg i get has the trouble before I write to VCD, so I know it is in the conversion.

I can't say with 100% certainty, but i think it has only done this with DIVX.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm wasting a lot of cds.

Have you been using out of standard bitrates in your MPEG or been using VBR. This is usually a sign that your bitrate is too high for your player to handle.

ASHY

I have an uncompressed AVI that plays well im MS-player. After encoding to MPEG2 the end of the clip is placed at the beginning instead of the beginning and the picture is horizontally and vertically displaced. After a few seconds the MPEG clip continues playing well again.
ANY suggestion? Thanks to all halping me...

Tobias.

anybody else this problem?

Hello,

Does anyone knows how I can simly add a picture (change disk for example) to a MPEG encoded file to be burned on disk?

Thanks,

Marc

You can insert this MPG via Nero Burning ROM or other software and make a VCD by placing this logo as the last track - at the end of the Film, the logo will show up and inform you to change the CD (remember to remove any pauses between the two mpegs)
http://www.dvd-digest.net/downloads/files/trailers/change_cd.exe

ASHY

Oops forget divx digest doesn't allow direst linking.
Download here instead.
http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/trailers.html

ASHY

Thank you Ashy,

Can you simple transfer JPG's or BMP's to MPG single frame movie parts?

Thanks,

Marc

VCD does support stills, but is difficult to do and you will need the right software. Head over to VCDhelp.com they have some software and tutorials to accomplish this.

ASHY

You could even encode the jpg and bmp files to mpeg with Tmpgenc and then join them to the end of your mpeg file, just a thought......

Whenever I use TMPGENC to convert DivX files to MPEG-1, the video content is converted OK but there is no sound. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

You're not doing anything wrong, this sometimes happens with DivX files. Use Virtual Dub to rip the sound stream in the DivX move to a wav, then use TMP to encode just the video stream. Re-multiplex the seperate video and sound streams in either TMP (under "mpeg tools") or use your authoring package to do the re-multiplexing.

Griff

It could be that your Divx contains ac3 audio. In this case you will need software able to decode ac3 to wav such as AVImux. Virtualdub will not do it correctly if it is.

You will then need to load your wav file as the audio source in TMPG and encode. If you already have the movie just encode the audio seperately and multiplex the result with your movie using the MPEGtools.

ASHY