Hi. Much reference is made to VCDHELP.COM, and it is indeed a good site. But much of the info there, like the info here, is helter-skelter... not really orgainized in a way like a text-book is...
I did find one online video production guide that is put together like a textbook. That is Luke's Video Guide. You can find it at : http://www.lukesvideo.com/ For people who don't know the first thing about frames, interlace, non-interlace, bitrate etc, Luke's guide is a great way to start.

I'm downloading movies, and i would like to know can i make them appear like dvd quality on my tv with my dvd player even if i only have a cd burner and not a dvd burner. Im using the NTSC under video-cd. Also is there anyway i can like add the menus and subtitles to downloaded movies so they can really appear to look like a real proffessional dvd? thanx

A standard VCD will never look like DVD Quality, the bitrate is way to low to achieve the quality you are looking for, you either have to make a XVCD or a SVCD, but there is no gaurantee than your dvd player will Play XVCD but most will play them, if you raise the bitrate to about 1650kbs you will greatly increase the quality of the Mpeg1/vcd file but you will have a bigger file size but you should be able to get about 60 minutes on a CD-R, and you can add chapters and menu"s and titles to your VCD but you need a authoring program that has these capabilities, you can use "ulead dvd workshop" but it will re-encode your file if it is a non-standard VCD which ruins the quality of your VCD, one program that will do this without re-encodeing is the "ulead dvd Plugin" that works with "Ulead Video studio 5 & 6" and "media Studio 6" it has a wizard style interface than is quite user friendly and has a quite good look when played....

is there any way i can make the quality better without making it a svcd because my dvd book said it wont play it but it didnt see anything about xscvc any other way ....any programs that wouldnt require a dvd burner

is there any way i can make the quality better without making it a svcd because my dvd book said it wont play it but it didnt see anything about xscvc any other way ....any programs that wouldnt require a dvd burner

If it will play VCD then it should play XVCD, but if it doesn"t play svcd then it won"t play XSVCD...You don"t need a DVD-Burner to use the programs I mentioned just a CD-Burner......

my dvd plays vcd's and in the book it says it will play vcd's but not svcd's but nothing about xsvcd...but how do i make an xsvcd anyways and how do i higher the bitrate? how much greater will the quality be and is there any other way if my dvd player wont play the xsvcd?

Trust me if is says it will not play svcd"s then it will not play xsvcd,XSVCD is just another less compatible form of svcd, which means it is a svcd with higher bitrates and or higher resolution..and it would not say it plays xsvcd because xsvcd is not a recognized standard, and either is xvcd ,there are many different forms of xsvcd and xvcd, and your player if it plays vcd might be able to play some types of xvcd and not other types, meaning it might play higher bitrates but not higher resolutions.....

To Raise the bitrate you will need to load the "unlock.mcf" template from the "Extra folder", the quality will be greatly increased if you raise the bitrate enough, but if you raise it too much you player won"t play it, start off with about 1650kbs this will get rid of the blockyness and your player shouldn"t have a problem with it, at "vcdhelp.com" you can look up your dvd player and see what it is capible of playing.....

so now that we've accomplished that , again i ask you, how can i get better graphics on my dvd player?

I allready told you, you have to raise the bitrate, and I gave you instructions on how to do .......

sorry my comp. is slow i didnt get the message with ur instructions b4, so anyways i double clickd on that file and nothing happened what exactly should i do to that unlock file to raise the bitrate...and by raising the bitrate it will be like perfect quality?

You have to load it like a "Template" ,so you click the "load" tab in the bottom right corner then find the "unlock.mfc" template, then choose it,, then the settings will be unlocked so you can change the settings, and the quality will be much better but it can only be as good as your source file, so if your avi file doesn"t look good then the mpeg file isn"t going to look good, you know the old saying "Garbage in garbage out", and useing the "Constant Quality" instead of CBR will give you better quality with a smaller file size, and you can use a higher bitrate without increasing the file size too much, so try this, in the settings go to "Rate Controll Mode" then change it to "Constant Quality" then click the little settings tab next to it and adjust the bitrate to "1000kbs minimum" and "4500kbs maximum" and the "Quality" at "85".. With these settings you will get much better quality and still get about 60 minutes on a CD-R......

can you tell me where the settings are i cant find them....and the environmental settings dont have any of the things u mentioned

forget i found it and did it .....why wouldnt it be better to crank everything up to a maximum? and how can i get really good quality movies how big should they be? thanx for all ur help today

Most scenes in a movie don"t need a whole lot of bits to give you good quality so if you give it to much bitrate your are just wasteing it, useing the CQ method only allocates the amount of bits needed to encode the frame , so if you set the max bitrate quite high the encoder isn"t going to use the max bitrate unless it needs to, this is the whole point of useing the "Variable Bit Rate" encodeing method, so you can achieve the maximum quality without useing the maximum amount of bits, this is how it can achieve the same quality with a lower bitrate and file size..

I have a movie split into two files one that is 790mb so im gonna have to split that into two files, so than the second file is only 53mb so i dont want to burn the first file on two dif. because of the split and then the third file. Is there any way i can merge the remaining piece of the first file with the secod file and fit the whole movie on only 2 cd's rather than 3. And another question i use the NTSC video-cd option can i use anything else that would make the quality better on my dvd player even if i dont have a dvd burner? thanx answer ASAP

Virtual dub is a good program to merge 2 movie parts together

thanx were can i get it at?

never mind i got virtual dub but i have no idea how to use it to merge the 2 files

take the time to print out the user manual for Virtual Dub, you got it when you downloaded the program.

Firstly if you are talking about MPEG movies then u cannot use Virtualdub to merge them. You will have to use the merge&cut feature in TMPG to do this.

Secondly why bother splitting and merging at all. Your 790mb movie will quite easily fit on to an 80min cd as 80min CDR's can hold 800mb of MPEG data.

ASHY

Hi!

Ok, I have a dvd ripped to hard drive, use dvd2avi to encode, then open in TMPGEnc, there is both a dv file, and a wav file. After encoding tho, there is no sound. Any suggestions?

Did u actually load the wav file into TMPG. If so is there sound in the original wav file? You may have ripped the wrong sound track.

ASHY

Ok, here I am, having this silly problem. When running dvd2avi, I see a solid, green screen. After encoding, I open in TMPGEnc, and it is still a solid green color. I have never had this problem before. Any suggestions?

If you see a solid green screen in the DVD2AVI preview window then that is what you will get when you encode.
I would suggest re-ripping the vobs again and make sure that your ripping program is ripping the correct stream.

ASHY

TMPGEnc 2.6
Prem 6.0
AMD 1700+

Questions:
1. If encoding w/ overclocked CPU (1900+), TMPGEnc encounter some sort of memory overflow error. (This is the only program that has this overclock issue). Why is this the case? Tmpgenc uses more memory power? Anyway around it besides slowing down my CPU?

2. For some reason, when encoding a 2 hrs video, from MS DV AVI file (Made from Prem 6.0), TMPGEnc stops at ~10min (9'58") time. The video segment is continous, not like there is a joining of 2 clips. I move the clip around and it again stops at the same time frame. How do I fix this?

Sincerely,
Perry.

Encoding is a very CPU/memory intensive process. Overclocking is a risky buisness at the best of times, but when your system is pushed to it's limits by such a task as encoding then your systems weaknesses will start to show through.

AMD processors are not the best CPU's to overclock due to the fact that they already run at high temperatures and encoding will push up this temperature drastically. If you need to overclock then at least provide your system with an extra exhast fan to remove the hot air re-circulating inside your system. This will make a big difference to the temperature.

Having said this it may not be the processor at fault, but your memory will also be overclocked and you may be pushing it too hard.
A lot of motherboards nowadays allow the frequency of the memory to be adjusted independently of the CPU frequency, so check this in your BIOS and reduce it accordingly.

ASHY

Ok guys, did vcdeasy, nice program. Adjust the resolution,bitrate and CQ, Have multiplexed audio. Had a successful write with vcdeasy, burned great, looks wonderful on WinDVD. Beautiful picture on the TV,BUT....Still jumpy and audio is out of sync. Burned at 2x. bitrate is 1650, max 5000 min 1500. What do you think???

There could be a few reasons. If the source frame rate is different to the destination frame rate this will cause jerky playback. If you only see this on your DVD player then you are either encoding to the wrong format format, ensure you encode to PAL or NTSC depending on your location otherwise you player will do a conversion to your TV standard which will cause the playback to stutter.

The other and more likely reason is that your player cannot handle the high bitrate you have chosen if this only happens on your DVD player. 5000 kb/s is very high for VCD or SVCD. If your player cannot spin the disk fast enough to read the data off the disk correctly then you will experience jerks and stutters at high bitrates.
There are only a handful of drives capable of handling the bitrate you have chosen. I suggest you go to VCDhelp.com and have a look at the DVD player list to see what ur player can handle.

ASHY

Will re-encode at lower max rate. Will try 3000. In the VCDeasy menu, there is an option in the playa section under misc. that says preferred tv system. Pal is selected. I am in the US and understand that ntsc is my usual format, I did not know if I needed to change that since it was not addressed in the tutorial. should I try changing that and burning at a higher speed 4x before re-encoding or does any of that matter? Thanks

I would change it to NTSC just for completeness, but I think it only affects stills and not the actual movie itself.
It is best not to burn above 4x as it can and usually does result in jerky playback. Even if it doesn't give jerky playback in your machine it will most likely cause jerky playbak in several others. So be safe and burn at 4x.

ASHY

I changed the misc. to ntsc. I have been burning at 2x. Can you burn too slow?

Unlikely. The only reason errors occur at higher speeds than 4x with most disks is due to the fact there are no error correction bits added when the disk is burned which means the MPEG is susceptible to corruption which only happens at higher speeds and will manifest as playback problems.

At low speeds the MPEG's own error correction is enough to cope with the errors already introduced by cheap disks, but burning at high speeds will further cause data corruption leading to playback problems.

ASHY

Hi,

wanted to transform a SCVD file (MPG2) into MPG1, but TMPGEnc shows me a "cannot open or not supported" command. Which version should I use and which CODEC? Can I get it to work properly at all ?

i've had same problem. but this is not a big problem.

open tmpenc (up version 2.5). open <file> <mpeg-tools>
you will see ||simple multiplex||. click on ||video input|| the <browse>-button.
select your source-video. might bee on the cd-drive. often in a "mpeg2"-folder.
the ||audio-input|| will be selected automatic.

select in ||output|| the destination folder and file on your harddisk.

in a final step(!) you must select the ||type|| at the pulldown-menu. select <mpeg-1-video-cd>.
click on <run> to start the transcoding. it will take some time. after all you can burn the new mpeg-1-file on a "vcd".

that's all.
most stand-alone-dvd-player will have no problem to deal with the "vcd". only a few have problems with the high bitrate. (in this way, i shown you, you cannot change the bitrate of the svcd-source-file to the vcd-destination-file. no work-around, sorry. but this way is the fastest way(!), because the vcd-destination-file is as big as the svcd-source-file an will take the same place on a cd. no cutting or afterworking!!).

haveFun!!

sehe gerade, h&auml;tte ich auch wohl in deutsch beantworten k&ouml;nnen. naja, wirst es wohl trotzdem abarbeiten k&ouml;nnen.
ach ja: manchmal treten probleme am ende einer svcd auf. die sind dann meistens so vollgestopft, dass das laufwerk macken macht. du solltest daher tunlichst darauf aufpassen, dass die quell-cd ganz sauber ist. nach der arbeit, sollte man nochmal das ende vergleichen, ob auch alles wirklich drauf ist. mir schon mal passiert, dass das happy end weg war. gibt meistens &auml;rger im freundeskreis bei einer videonacht!!!

Hi, Ihave just started this download thing and have now sucessfully downloaded all the stuff to make my first vcd -- but where and what do i dofirst???????????????????

Kym, questions like that require such a long and complex answer that the true gurus on this BBS - and I am not one of them - generally suggest that you first go to: VCDHELP.COM and read the TMPG guides that they have on that site, and then ask more specific questions.

In my experience TMPG is best suited for taking raw .AVI files (such as KaZaa downloaded movies or videos, or TV shows caught with a video capture board that is installed into your computer) and then transforming them into MPG files. You can then use the MPEG editing tools that TMPG contains to divide the 1.5 gigabyte movie file into 3 or more smaller files, that will fit on three or more VCDs. But unless you have a very special DVD player, you will not be able to simply copy the MPG files to a blank CD-R and play them. Most likely, you will need to obtain something like Nero's BURNING ROM and use this for the final "touch up" before it burns the movie to the CD-R(s).

In my experience... several months now... movie files that say that they have been encoded by MPEG 4 software (AKA DiVX) require a lot more work on our parts. Then again, this could be my ignorance talking at this point. I always seem to have to use Virtual Dub (a program that I don't understand 1/100 of, to make a wav file of the audio from the original movie file and then use this .WAV file as the audio source when I am transforming the DiVX.AVI to an .MPG format. (And even then I still have some problems with the audio matching perfectly the video... its a learning process!!!)

>But unless you have a very special DVD player, you will not be able to simply copy the MPG files to a blank CD-R and play them. Most likely, you will need to obtain something like Nero's BURNING ROM and use this for the final "touch up" before it burns the movie to the CD-R(s).

What do you mean by touch up? Surely you are not suggesting re-encoding the MPEG files with NERO. NERO is a terrible encoder and what would be the point when TMPG produces far superior files.

If you split a file with TMPG you have to ensure you choose the correct stream type before splitting to attach the required headers. I.E. 'MPEG1 Video CD' or 'MPEG2 SVCD(VBR)' depending on the file otherwise your burning program such as NERO will complain about the file and may attempt to re-encode it.

ASHY

ASHY writes:
What do you mean by touch up? Surely you are not suggesting re-encoding the MPEG files with NERO. NERO is a terrible encoder and what would be the point when TMPG produces far superior files.

Hi Ashy,
No I never re-encode with NERO... what I meant was that Nero does "something" to the TMPG made file that will allow the burned file to be played on most DVD players. I don't know the proper term for it....

Ashy wrote
If you split a file with TMPG you have to ensure you choose the correct stream type before splitting to attach the required headers. I.E. 'MPEG1 Video CD' or 'MPEG2 SVCD(VBR)' depending on the file otherwise your burning program such as NERO will complain about the file and may attempt to re-encode

Paul asks
I have to be honest with you, I am not following what you said here ...
I AM having problems with the audio components of movies that I divide up to fit onto VCDs.I have done the Virtual Dub thing to extract the.wav audio from the AVI file, and then I make the MPG using the 2 different source files, the original avi for the video and then the .wav for the audio source. Then I get the new MPG and edit it into smaller files to fit onto the VCD.
Ashy...what I'm getting from you is that the job is still not over. That I am not doing something correctly after I have the MPG file but before I make the edited files. Can you please tell me specifically what step I need to do?

As I said when you split an MPEG using the MPEG tools you have choose the correct stream type as said above. If you simply leave the stream type as 'MPEG1 system(automatic)' then you will end up with a plain old MPEG file without the VCD headers required by your burning program which should complain about it.
If you continue to burn and ignore these warnings then you may find your file will not play correctly causing symptoms such as audio de-sync, no audio and playback artifacts.

If your MPEG is in sync before you burn and you have followed the steps above then you are either creating out of standard MPEG files which your DVD player cannot handle or your burning program is not compatible with your player.

Earlier versions of NERO are known to cause audio sync problems with certain players. If this is the case try a new version or a different program altogether such as VCDeasy or one known to correct this problem is 'Instant cd-dvd'

ASHY

I'm new to digital video and am trying to get up on the learning curve. I purchased the Dazzle DVD Creation Station 200 for the purpose of converting analog Hi8mm video to DVD. I was under the impression from the Dazzle literature that the encoding to MPEG2 was done via an encoding chip in the device itself. Yet it seems that the captured video requires first "rendering" in Movie Star, then "assembly" in DVD Complete; two of the software suites included. The capture appears to work fine, playing cleanly in Windows XP Media Player, but becomes blocky and heavily pixelated upon "rendereing". Dazzle support isn't worth mentioning. I checked VCDhelp.com and several people suggest the use of TMPGEnc to encode the captured video, then either using DVD Complete or Nero 5.5 to burn the DVD. My questions are: 1)If the analog video is truely converted to MPEG2 by the encoding chip, what encoding, rendering, producing is then required? 2)When the DVD CS200 captures the video it creates several files, one of which is an .mpg extention. Should this file include the video and audio? I have successfuly used TMPGEnc to encode/render the .mpg file, but when I select system video+audio, TMPGEnc won't/can't access the same .mpg file for the audio. 3) Can you suggest a good resource for the novice regarding the process of creating DVD's from video?

Thanks and apologies for the lack of brevity,
Fred

From my experience these so called "Tolal Video Solution" cause more problems than Solutions, if while captureing you have the option to render to "AVI" instead of Mpeg then do it cuz the Dazzle mpeg encodeing is less than desireabled, that is why the picture becomes blocky after rendering, and encodeing the rendered mpeg to mpeg will not increase the quality..if you can render to avi format then encode with Tmpgenc then author with "Dazzale DVD Complete" then you should retain most of the quality of the captured movie, as long the the "DVD Complete" does not re-encode the file for you....You can probably find a guide that can be usefull at "vcdhelp.com".......

Currently using v2.57. No real problems to date. Only thing I noticed is that I cannot save my custom SVCD profile. I have created other profiles with no problems saving. IE CVD Anyone out have same issue?

I haven"t had a problem with than but you can allways make templates with other versions and use them in this version......

Sorry to but in here, but Minion, you mentioned templates. Do you know what the difference is between a TPR and a MCF? When I save my own settings,it's always a TPR file, The TMPGEnc templates are all MCF. How do I make a MCF template with grayed out settings, and only leave those that I want open to adjust?

A "TPR" file is not a Template ,it is a "Project file" that is used in "Batch encodeing" or to frameserve with Vfapi, to save a template you first have to load the "unlock.mfc" template from the "Extra Folder" this will unlock the settings so you can change them , and when you want to save a template you click the "save" tab in the bottom right corner next to the "Load" tab...

Thanks Minion again. :) I also figured out what was wrong with adding chapters. I don't have the details yet, but I was able to solve the problem, and I'll be posting a "I fixed it" thread shortly. Basiclly it was the bitrate not VCDEasy.

I'm haveing problems. I am no longer able to convert avi to mpeg with tmpgenc. I'm not sure what happened. I had an older version of tmpgenc and i upgraded to 2.57 and then it stopped working with avi's and i went back to the older version and it's not working with them now either. can anyone help?

Have you tried to extract the audio out of the AVI file? You can use a utility called VirtualDub to do this if TMPGEnc has a problem with the audio.

If you told us what was happening then we might be able to help you but saying that it don"t work doesn"t give us much information to go on...You wouldn"t possibly be getting a "Can not open or unsupported" error when trying to load in your avi file???If that is your problem you will find the answer on this BBS repeatedly......

Hi

I had a few days before the similar situation - I tried to get a divx converted to a VCD (or mpg). And I had another error msg.

What I did was the following: I downloaded the SW so called VIRTUALDUB from doom9.org and just started it. I opened the divx-avi file, set within the video and also the audio menu the settings to >direct stream copy< and then just saved the project as AVI file again.

I started TMPGEnc as usual, opened now my new AVI-file and ran through the same process - and this time without any error. It just did it like I expected it from the beginning.

Just go and try it and let me know.

Have fun:-)
Kai