I have SONY TRV340E Digital handycam and have ULEAD Media studio pro software.
MY system configuration:PII 450 MHz, 196 MB RAM, 4MB Video RAM.
I use IEEE 1394 firewire card for transfer of digital images from handycam to my computer. I try to edit the images and put in VCD format. When
iexport it to VCD (.dat format), I observe that the image quality is not good. I see very small rectangles in the images and the images is not at all clear. The real colour is also lost. Even the .mpg or .avi which I see in my system after transferring from the handycam is of poor quality.
When I see the same images in my handycam,it is crystal clear.

I understand that, a vcd can have only a limited quality only at that bitrate. But I saw some VCD films has perfect crystal clear images.
How to achieve that clarity? I have tried giving maximum resolution in the software while saving in VCD format;p but , only the .dat size increases.
How to get crystal clear images at 60 mins / VCD?
Must I upgrade my system? or is there any other software for this?
Any weblinks regarding this?

I dont know how to create good clarity images in VCD. All I have now is unclear/low quality images in VCD. I dont know how to translate that very good high clarity digital images in to VCD without loss in the quality of images.

Any small help is highly appreciated.

Thanks & Regards,
Rajesh

You say that you are transferring digital images from your camcorder to the PC. I am taking this to mean photographs and not movies.

Most camcorders capture still images at 1 megapixel if they use a card, or they capture at 720x480 if they capture to tape. This is not much resolution to begin with. You are then resizing it to 352x240 making it even lower quality.

If you are dealing with photographs it might be better to make a Kodak PhotoCD instead. There are a number of programs to make them or you could use an online photo service or your local photo shop. This will give much better quality and all computers and many dvd players today will play them. Another advantage to this is that you could more easily search through them. You would have to view them in a linear fashion on VCD.

Video Guy

I am very sorry for the misleading word images.
It is not pictures but normal video files.

Thanks for your answer.

Regards,
Rajesh

I noticed that TMPGEnc could make DVDs. What's the difference between TMPGEnc and TMPGEnc DVD Author? And, is the DVD-making in TMPGEnc free or trial? What is the price?

If you want to use MPEG1 to burn your DVD, yes, It can.
But TMPGEnc is only for encode the MPEG1 but not MPEG2.

Guess you mean:

"But TMPGEnc is only free for encode to MPEG1 but not MPEG2."

Well then, what's the difference between TMPGEnc Plus! and DVD Author?

Tmpgenc Plus is an Encoder and Tmpgenc DVD Author is a DVD authoring Program...They are 2 Totally seperate Program that serve 2 seperate Purposes, Were Tmpgenc is used to encode your files to Mpeg2 for DVD, Tmpgenc DVD author adds Menu"s and Chapters to your Movie and Formats it to a Video-TS Folder that then gets burned to DVD..Tmpgenc has No DVD authoring Abilitied and DVD author has no Encodeing abilities so the 2 Programs to 2 totally seperate things.....Cheers

Hello All,

I'm trying to make SVCD from homemade video (PAL) using TMPGEnc Version 2.521.
I have audio out of sync and about 1-3 sec freeze if I encode 2-pass VBR mpeg
on standalone DVD/SVCD player (PHILIPS).
Configuration for VBR:
Average: 2520
Maximum: 2520
Minimum: 0
Max pass: 2 pass (old type)

I thought it might be a sound problem, so I split and reencoded sound using
192 kbit/sec (was 224). Then merged using bbMPEG and it displayed
interesting things. bbMPEG says that maximum bitrate is about 3012 kbit/sec
and average is 2520. I reencoded in CBR (2520 kbit/sec) and problem is gone.

Can someone explain why maximum bitrate run over specified 2520 in VBR mode?
Is there any tool that can help analyse VBR MPEG file in order to
find out max/min/avg bitrate?

Thanks,
Alex.

Well First off you should Not set your Average and Max to the Same Value because that defeates the Purpose of useing 2-Pass VBR ..There is a Little Tool called "Bitrate Viewer" "http://www.tecoltd.com/bitratev.htm" that will analize the Max and Min bitrates...Tmpgenc does not have the best Bitrate controll and has a Habbit of Going over the Max bitrate specified especially with the settings you were useing.....

OK so i'm trying to make the 2nd part of my vcd movie right, and i'm trying to split the movie so i try move that thing to the end frame and then when i try to click set end frame it's frozen!!! I have restarted many times but nothing and it worked before

See Vdub MP3
http://www.movieking.co.uk/guides/badframes.html

I have a heap of TV Eps that I have taken from VHS on to my PC they are approx 25-30mins each,

what settings do people recommend so that I could fit a large group of these onto a dvd,

Cheers
Llamma

I have HD video source material with a resolution of 1920x1080i that I want to encode in MPEG2. When I feed this to TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 (lastest version and it is license to me), I cannot change the setting from MP&ML (main profile and main level) to MP&HL (main profile and high level). The selection button in the setting page is grayed and cannot be changed. Also, I am not able to increased the bit rate above 8 Mbits/s. My target bit rate is 16 Mbits/s. When I try to encode it, the material is downconverted to 720x480i (NTSC DVD format).

I also have the MainConcept MPEG2 encoder. This encoder allows me to encode in MP&HL and to set the bit rate to 16 Mbits/s. Also the resolution is kept to its original resolution. The quality is very exceptional (it is significantly better than all the hardware HDTV MPEG2 encoder that I have access to). I would like to evaluate other encoder on HD encoding, but so far only MainConcept and AVI2MPEG2 allows it.

I am doing something wrong in setting TMPGEnc Plus?
Can TMPEGEnc Plus be set in MPEG2 MP&HL?

Thank you

That's Easy. Click on the WORD Profile & Level. A Box will apear, select unlock. Now you can use all Profiles/Levels, higher Resolutions and higher Bitrates.

This Unlock-Function works on nearly all Options.

Thank you. This is great. I did not know why these settings where locked and how I can unlock them.

I unlocked everything. I was able to encode my HD 16x9 1920x1080i material at MP & HL. However even after unlocking the bit rate, I am not able to go above 8 Mbits/s. When I change it, it revert to 8 Mbis/s.

I did a test at 8 Mbits/s with both MainConcept and TMPGEnc. They both looked bad (8 Mbits/s is too low for HD). However the results from the MainConcept is significantly better than TMPGEnc.

Thank you again

Then there's still something going wrong. There's absolutly no chance to beat TMPGEnc with Mainconcept if you use the right settings.

And if you really use the right Profile, you can use the higher Bitrates. I have done this serveral times, works perfect.

Actually I have Had Very Good Results with the Newest Version of the MainConcept encoder, Good enough were files encoded by the 2 were basicly indistinguishable from each other, Then again lots encoders will produce good Quality at high bitrates what sets them appart is how they work at low bitrates....Cheers

I have the lastest version of many MPEG2 encoder (TMPGEnc 2.5 Plus, CCE basic 2.67, MainConcept 1.4, Pinnacle, Ulead, etc). I have evaluated many of these for various material (Standard definition NTSC and High Definition 720p, 1080i).

With the same source material and same target bit rate, here is my rating for
speed: 1) CCE 2) MainConcept 3) Ulead 4) TMPGEnc 5) Pinnacle
quality low bit rate: 1)MainConcept 2) TMPGEnc 3) Pinnacle 4) CCE 5)Ulead
quality high bit rate: 1) MainConcept 2)TMPGEnc & CCE 3) Pinnacle 4) Ulead

I posted previously that I was not able to go above 8 Mbits/s as the target bit rate. I asked the question to Pegasys tech support. They replied to me with the solution. Here is is for others in the same situation:

Click "Load" in the main window, then select "Extra">"unlock.mcf" and open
it, and then you can set your target bit rate is 16 Mbits/s.

Thank you

Hi.

I'm trying to make a svcd file with subtitles using TMPGEnc and VobSub 2.23.
When I set the Directshow priority (to the top of the list) in TMPGEnc and press start, TMPGEnc crashes. There is no error massage, just crash. I've tried different versions of TMPGEnc, no help.
I can see the subtitles just fine in Media Player and other players I use thanks to VobSub, but it seems to me that the changing the priority of DirectShow crashes TMPGEnc. The problem hasn't got anything to do with VobSub, cause TMPGEnc hangs every time when DirectShow is on the top of the priority list, even if VobSub is not installed.
Anyone else suffering from this same error?

I'm getting desperate.
Juukeli

Sorry, forgot to mention:

WinXP Pro
512 MB DDR (333)
AMD Athlon 2000XP
IBM 120 GB HD

Even uninstalled directX and installed it again, no help.

Juukeli

On my maschine, DirectSHow ist the first one in the List, without any problems. Did you try ffdshow as Decoder for DivX/XviD?

It's a better Idea to use VirtualDub or AVISynth to do any resizings and for including the Subtitles. In VirtualDub you can use the PlugIn TextSub, in AVISynth VSFilter. VobSub itself uses Overlay-Functions to show the Subs, they are not included into the Video, so TMPGEnc can't see them.

Thanks for answering. Yes, TMPGEnc sees the subtitles, if Directshow is the first on the list. I can see subtitles in preview, but for some reason, when I press start -button, the program crashes.

Now I'm doing SVCD like...
1. Use virtualdub and subtitler -plugin
2. Save avi with the hard coded subtitles
3. Convert the package to svcd with TMPGEnc

It works, but I have to do more steps and that takes time :-(
Others have been more successfull with VobSub and TMPGEnc I think reading those forums and sites. 4 example: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/userguides/153058.php

Juukeli

Forget Step 2 of your Methode, you can use VirtualDub's Frameserver to serv the Video directly to TMPGEnc without saving an AVI first.

I know the way descriped in the link you postet, but it's a... um..., shitty way. Naver do anything else than pure Encoding with TMPGEnc. All other things, like filtering, resizing and so on shall be done by using other Tools.

Thanks. Now it's working with vdub. :-)

I used TMPGEnc totaly for some weeks now and I realy must say: TMPG has nice features not fount on every tool, but there are bugs everywhere, which exist for so long now. Thousand version numbers have changed since I first encountered some bugs and they still exist... what are they doing from one version to another?

For example: the issue with no sound in the output file when source is a AVI with a mp3 audio track: You get the same answer everywhere: "TMPGEnc can't handle mp3 with VBR". But that's not true since I was able to extract such a mp3 track (yeah: virtualdub direct stream copy) and pass it seperately over to TMPGEnc... result was fine. So why can they not fix this little problem???

Another issue existing for long now: you always should activate "SOURCE RANGE" and specify start point and end point of your movie since TMPGEnc sometimes gets confused by its own default setting "end point = -1" and can't disply the filesize in step 4 of the (realy good) Project Wizard properly. Must be realy hard to fix :-?

This are only few examples which arise the question: "is this comercial piece of software or just a troublemaker you have to pay for".

I'm glad that I could try this software before buying :-)

I'm not glad that bug reports are only accepted from registered users who spend money on this...

So don't get me totaly wrong: I REALY like the ideas of TMPGEnc. But if I would have spend so many bugs on it (in order to get all functions) I already would have thrown my PC out of this window just beside me...

But as I mentioned I REALY like the ideas and features of TMPGEnc and would realy like to see it working fine... last but not least because there is no other software that competes with TMPGEnc (for my purposes).

Nice posting, but where are the Bugs?

TMPGEnc is a MPEG-Encoder, and it works perfect.
No propper VBR MP3-Decoding? That isn't a thing a MPEG-Encoder must do. On normal Video-Production, you never have VBR-Audio to be transcodet to MPEG-Audio. You need this Feature only to transcode Videos from the Web - illegal Videos!
And why should a program support illegal things? Jeez, Guys, ANYBODY who asks about VBR MP3-Audio reveals itself as an User of pirated Movies...

Oh, and there is absolutly no problem with Source Range, works perfect... except on suspicious Files.

I agree with B Racer.

The reason you are having problems with source range is because your avi file has a corrupt index. When you have an avi with a corrupt index, 99% of the time it was downloaded from a p2p (especially since it has vbr mp3 audio).

There is nothing wrong with TMPGEnc, its your files that have bugs. Buy the DVD next time.

I agree that Most or the So called "Bugs" aren"t Bugs in Tmpgenc But bugs in the Files you are trying to encode...Downloaded Files are the worst Files to try to encode cuz they are usually corrupted in some way and Poeple have this stupid habbit of useing VBR Mp3 audio which AVI wasn"t meant to have VBR audio...If I use Files that I created My Self I never have Problems but with downloaded files I allways have Problems...The Only thing I might call a Bug is that the Merge & Cut sometimes freezes when outputting Mpeg2 files, but this happens only once in a While so it might not even be considered a Bug....Cheers

I also am gonna have to agree with you guys. I have been using TMPG for ages now and very rarely get any problems. I use to when I first started using it because I didn't know how things worked and how the software could be affected by feeding it crap.

Now I know how to use TMPG and what it is and isn't compatible with, it usually works perfect for me.
All these people who claim to have problems with TMPG are usually novices who think you can just bung in any old piece of crap and TMPG will somehow miraculously work with it and produce a beautiful result at the end. No chance and you soon learn this isn't just TMPG. The old addage usually stands 'Crap in Crap out'

Feed TMPG with garbage, install every codec known to man on your system and don't even bother learning how to use TMPG in the first place (IE be lazy and the wizard do it all) and all you WILL get is problems, but these are not TMPG bugs these are USER bugs because they are all caused by inexperienced users who half the time don't even know what a codec is.

In conclusion...learn to use TMPG correctly and it will serve you greatly.

What is the difference between the two or is one TMPGEnc and the pro version the DVD Author version.

You must mean the "Plus" version...Well the Free Version has Limited Mpeg2 encodeing which Runs out in 30 Days, But the Mpeg1 encodeing works forever, And the Plus Version has access to More Profiles and Levels Like "MP@HL ,MP@LL and HP@HL" which lets you use Larger resolutions Like HDTV Resolution...And it is supposed to have a Better 2-Pass encodeing Method and the Mpeg2 encodeing is Unlimited..So if you Plan on useing Tmpgenc for Mpeg2 encodeing for more than a Month will you have to Purchace the "Plus" version...
Tmpgenc DVD Author and Tmpgenc are to totally different Programs ,Tmpgenc DVD Author is For authoring Mpeg files to DVD ,It is a Very simple Program to use and ok for doing Basic DVD authoring With Basic Menu"s and Chapters...Cheers

In downloads all I see is TMPGEnc Version 2.521 (1,733KB). Is there a place to download the "plus" version for trial. TIA

I have tried to convert an .avi movie to PAL video-CD using TMPEnc
I selected the .avi movie as both the video and audio source
The end movie has excellent picture quality but no sound at all

This is because the Audio in your AVI file is of a Format that is not supported Bt Tmpgenc..You will have to extract the audio from the AVI file to WAV format useing something like "Virtual Dub" then use the Wav file as the audio source in Tmpgenc....Cheers

first make sure you have the right codec's
http://www.movieking.co.uk/guides/codecs.html

Then make sure VFAPI priorities are right
http://www.movieking.co.uk/guides/tmpgencplugin.html

TMPGENC will encode anything you can play, so long as you dont install things like FFDshow filters for playback only.

Help me pls!!!
The output file has no sound. What happened?
Thanks in advance for your answer.
Pippol

What kind of file are you trying to encode (avi, mpg)?

What is the format of the audio you are trying to encode (wav, mp3, ac3, mpa)?

I've been using TMPGEnc for the last 3 years and I was wanting to know how to get rid of the pixel squares or blocks that appear in the pictures in some areas....especially in light areas (white, lt. blue or even black). When I'm watching a movie than when those solid colors come up I see the little "squares" floating around in the area of the picture. How can I get rid of those while encoding? I know there's got to be a way to do that cuz I know this is one of the best programs to use for everything (slow), but the best! Please somebody help me out!

Those Blocks are "Macro Blocks" and are Caused By useing too Low of a Bitrate, But can also show up when you source file isn"t of the Highest Quality...If you select "Soften Block Noise" it can help a Bit but also can blur the Image as a Side effect....Cheers

Concerning these pixel squares I also have a question: I'm trying to encode an AVI divx file into a svcd. When I play the original file on my pc with, say divx player or even the windows player (with divx decoder), it looks fine. However, when I converted it using TMPGenc, block noise appeared.

Browsing through the frames (under TMPGenc) I found that indeed, some of the frames from the original divx file are "blocky".

Are those blocks really presend in the *original* file?
If so why do they not show up when I play the original file with divx player?

Or are they generated when TMPGenc converts the file?
If so, how can I get rid of them?

I tried the block noise reduction under TMPGenc but it seems to have absolutely *no effect* on the pixelated frames.

Help Please!

DivX-Files ARE that blocky... Since a couple of Versions, DivX and XviD do perform a Noise-Fuction while playing a Videos. This extra noise hides the blockyness of the Video.
It is possible to let this Noise appear while encoding (use ffdshow as Decoder), but this needs a lot of Bitrate and will eventually produce new Blocks in the resulting Video.

If you don't belive me, use ffdshow for Decoding and Mplayer Classic as Player. Turn the Noise-Function of and watch the Movie...

Thanks for the info, but I think that I've mis-described my problem. If you go here:

http://webhome.idirect.com/~telsan/noise.html

You will find a snapshot of what is happening.

This boxiness only happens on a few frames, but it is noticable. It does NOT appear when I play the original divx file on either divx or mplayer (with ffdshow) decoder. It appears when I *open* the file in MPEGenc to encode it into a SVCD and in the subsequent svcd file.

I have three such files. The first one converted from divx to svcd without a hitch. The other two exhibit this symptom. SO where is this problem comming from? The original? The conversion?

It's very annoying to have those corrupted frames and not be able to burn addotional svcds from the other two files.

Any further imput would be very helpful.

Thanks

Oh, OK, now i see... strange.

Looks like a Decoding problem.

Please try to open the Vid with AVIsynth:

DirectShowSource("my_movie.avi", fps=29.97")
ConvertToRGB24()

Set fps= to the Framerate of the Source Video.

Darn, saw the Typo just a Second after pressing Submit... ;)

That's better:

DirectShowSource("my_movie.avi", fps=29.97)
ConvertToRGB24()