Hi there!
I have an Athlon XP 1800+ that I use to capture video for SVCDs using a Pinnacle DC10plus. After capture I use TMPGEnc to compress to MPEG. I use 2-pass VBR in TMPGEnc and it takes about 4-5 hours to encode a 30 minutes movie.
I have a 40 GB IBM UDMA hard disk.

So the question is: I'm considering buying a new and larger harddisk. What will be fastest, one 120 GB disks or two 60 GB disks using RAID to work as one disk? I know the RAID solution should give a higher transfer rate, but will that be noticable during the MPEG-encoding.
In other word, is the harddisk speed or the cpu-speed the bottleneck when encoding MPEG-files?

Thanks a lot in advance.
Soren

Hi,
I have an xp 1800+ too with FIC AN11 motherboard with a RAID 0 connection. Personally, I think RAID is great for video editing. I'm using RAID 0 (stripping) with two maxtor 60 gig with 7200 rpm, and I can encode 40 minutes of avi video in about 25-30 minutes to mpeg-1 vcd format. DVD and SVCD still take quite a while, especially if I specify the VBR double pass setting. I LOVE Raid. I will be upgrading to RAID 0+1 (stripping and mirroring) soon so I can get fault tolerance. I increased my pcmark harddrive benchmark score by about 300 points (I was scoring about 800-900 with UDMA 5, brought that up to 1150 or so after RAID) when I installed RAID.

However, as I'm sure you know you won't see any increase in performance if you use RAID 1 (mirroring), which doesn't support stripping. Also, RAID 0 is not fault tolerant. You will lose your entire partition if one of the disks fail--so be warned.

I forgot to specify that for the "25-30" minutes, I'm using one pass, CBR.

Just did a quick check of svcd encoding timer for 20 minutes of video 2 pass VBR 1950kbps svcd--reading it at an hour on the timer.

The bottleneck is overwhelmingly CPU speed.

While a computer's processor is always important, a system is only a strong as it's weakest link. Since you are writing to the harddrive as well as processing the video during the encoding process, having a high performance harddrive can only help. And according to RAID-Info http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html, RAID 0 is recommended for video editing. I'd go with the raid over the single harddive--it's worth it imo.

my tmpg does not accept .vdr files how come ??

Make sure you set up the virtual dub frame server by double clicking "auxsetup" and choose "setup frame server" but you probably know that.

hi, i've been using Tmpgenc to make svcds but i heard that you can make a cvd from tmpgenc...is this true?...if so, how can i do it?

To make a cvd you just change the resolution to 352 by 480 and do the rest of the settings like a svcd....

looking at previous posts someone mentioned that ver 2.56 is bugged and thats why this problem occurs with divxmpeg4 v3 and that everything works fine with ver 2.54. So is it possible to get the older version?

This might be a problem with microsoft's mp43 dll--not tmpg. MS doesn't want us encoding in mp43 (according to Virtual Dub's "coach message") so they have taken measures to prevent playback etc. I had problems encoding mpeg from mp43 until I installed some dll fix I downloaded (which has subsequently been removed from the site due to MS complaint).

So does TMPGEnc support conversion of divxmpeg4 v3 files? One 25 minute show turns into a whopping 70 minute file with no sound. I hope someone can help here.

There shouldn"t be a problem encodeing any form of divx files as long as you have the proper codecs installed on your machine, try raiseing the "direct show file reader" in the "vfapi plugins" and if you can"t see the movie in the screen while encodeing then the movie probably isn"t encodeing properly.

Hi,

I've read that higher bit rate will yield better result, although larger
MPG file. I've tried CBR at 10,000 bit rate, and the picture looks sharper
than 8,000; escpecially with montion. With 2 hour video, the sound is fine
until 1hr 21mins 45sec into the footage, and then sound disappeared until
near the end, then sound suddenly came back.

What is the highest bit rate I can set without loosing audio, I've read
somewhere that with DVD maximum bit rate is 9,800. Is this true?
Have anybody run into this problem? Or am I missing other parameters?

Sonny

The Max DVD bitrate is 9.8mbs but on a computer you can set the bitrate a lot higher cuz software players can handle higher bitrates,so if the audio cut out while watching it on your computer it is probably because the audio encoder in tmpgenc sometime does that, that"s why it is better to use the external audio encoder plugins for tmpgenc like toolame or scmpx..

Actually I just read that the audio cutting out is a bug in the 2.56 version but it is supposed to be fixed it this new one....

Hi,

Where can I download the new 2.57 trial version?
TMPGEnc.net still have the old 2.56 version for download.

Sonny Trang

I have an AVI video with a Video Compression of MS-MPEG4 V3, and when I try using TMPGenc so that I can convert it to MPEG-1 the only thing that I can hear is the sound of the video when I watch the MPEG-1 version. What can I do? Are there any programs out there that can allow me to turn the AVI to MPEG-1 completely with sound and video?


By the way, I'm turning the AVI video to MPEG-1 in order so that I can make it into VCD

i saw in a few earlier posts that there is some bug with version 2.56 so you have to use the older version to fix the problem.

Does anybody have any Jog Shuttle controllers working with TMPGenc's editing features?

E.g. Canopus JD-1, Pinnacle Energy, Contour ShuttlePro

I've noticed that on many movies there's a tag i an upper or lower corner - is there any way of removing it ?
-M

What do you mean by "Tags"?? You mean little logo"s in the corner,right?Where do you see these logos at?Are they on the mpegs you have encoded but not on the avi? or are they on the movie files you have downloaded and wan"t to get rid of them?

Yeah, they are small logos
They are in the movie file (source file, usually avi) that I'm trying to encode to mpeg form.

I don't think that I via 'tmpeg enc' will be able to remove it, but if anyone knows how to get rid of them I'd greatly appreciate them telling me.
-M

You can try the "clip frame" option to cut out the logo"s but your movie might have a stretched look to them.

i have this movie, with avi extention... but it is not divx file :(
divx player wont open it, divxinfo program would say it is no avi,
divxfix program would say the same...
but it IS a movie because i can play it in wmp and windvd...
so my question is - how can i find it correct format and what extention
it should have???
any program i could open this file with, press properties and have
all the info?

Download this program called "AVI Info" at :http://isengrim.rotegruetze.net/avi-info.html

It will tel you what codec your avi was encoded with and a whole bunch of other stuff about your file...

i HAVE avi info program, and it wouldnt open the file saying
IT IS NO AVI FILE!

I think if you play the file in media player and while it is playing go to properties in media player and see what it says the format is.......

Hi I have a very big problem now. When I use frame save in Virtualdub
And open the file in TMPGEnc the file open just fine, but when am finish
Whet the settings and hit start I get this messages,
Illegal floating decimal point calculation, and the error occurred when ACM
Was initialised

I don¡Çt use to have this kind of problems
When I open the movie I TMPGEnc theirs no problems???
And it the same whit all of my movies
I have tread to play whit the DirectShow plugin and nop dint help

Martin
rikkmar@mail1.stofanet.dk

The ACM error has to do with audio I believe so try frame serveing just the video and encode the audio seperately and see if that works.

nop is just the same

The ACM refers to the windows AUDIO COMPRESSION MANAGER and is the decoding/encoding engine used for compressing/decompressing audio with whichever audio codec you have installed for that particular file.

It is likely that this is a codec problem and it may have something to do with not having the correct codec to decode the audio in the file or maybe a corrupt codec.

ASHY

i have fix the problem i just downloade all the plugins from Tmpeg plugin page and now it runing YES YES

I have a question.I'm using TMPGEnc to make my vcd's,and svcd's from the AVI's
And im not having no problems there at all.(knock on wood)Anyway some of the AVI's i have also have subtitles usually a different lang.Anyway my question is,Is there a way to get rid of the subtitles using TMPGEnc? or if not is there another program out there that can.Any help would be much appreciated.

If the subtitles are part of the picture then I think you are out of luck.You can try useing the "clip frame" option but this will make the file looked all stretched out.....