Hi,

After a struggle with DVD2SVCD, CCE, LSX, VOBSUB, VirtualDub..., i continued to use the following workflow:

1. (optional) DVD rip with SmartRipper

2. DVDx 2.0: make a huffyuv compessed 253x288 (PAL) AVI with selected subtitles, PCM audio track (converted to 44.1kHz, dolby surround compatible, high quality conversion), no deinterlacing.

3. TMPGenc: encode to XVCD (2-pass VBR, bitrate: 500min, 2400max, average calculated using wizard for 80min VCD), sound 224 or lower for long movies, motion search p. highest quality, default matrix, no motion search for still pict... ON)

4. Nero: burn


I have no problem whatsoever converting to or playing my VCDs in my DVD player or comp. I understand that huffyuv is loseless codec so there is no quality loss when making AVI file. For sound, I'm using PCM, 44,1kHz, stereo, 172 kb/s and I don't know if this is OK or there is a better way, quality and surround concerned.
With DVD2SVCD i have trouble with mpg file sizes (they are ussualy too big for one CD), subs (wrong subs encoded sometimes) and it requires too much attention.
With VirtualDub I have too much trouble with subs...

Can I get a better quality VCD than what I'm getting now with not too much trouble?

Best regards,
Goran

Well the First thing you can do is Not make an AVI file ...Even though Huffyuv is Lossless there is still no Reason to make an AVI file..You Can Load the D2V file that SmartRipper Made directly into Tmpgenc without makeing a Big avi file.. Or use DVD2AVI to Make one and extract the audio and encode them in Tmpgenc, you will save a Lot of time and You Might notice a Small Quality improovement.You can also try makeing SVCD"s, they Do look a Lot better than VCD"s and you Can if you tweak it right get close to an Hour on a CD-r with good quality...

First, I CANNOT load D2V file into TMPGenc (...or unsupported.). Raising Directshow to 2 doesn't help. Second, if I succeed, how can I encode with subtitles from D2V? From where is this quality loss between AVI and D2V coming? Is it noticable?
BTW, making an AVI is working in realtime (2 hours for 2 hour movie).
I'm avoiding DVD2AVI route because of the subtitles.
I'm not interrested in SVCD 'cause I don't want to swap disks while watching the movie.

So, other than time and small quality loss, there is no better way to go with VCD?

Best regards,
Goran

Well you Have to Have DVD2AVI installed and the "DVD2AVI.vfp" file from the DVD2AVI folder has to be Copied and Pasted into the Tmpgenc folder Before Tmpgenc will accept D2V files, you Can see if you Have the Correct plugin Installed by going to the "Vfapi Plugins" and looking for the "DVD2AVI.vfp Plugin".. I don"t Know how You manage to achieve Good Quality and still Fit a 2 hour Movie on 1 CD-r,Putting VCD/SVCD on 2 or More CD-R"s is Part of Makeing VCD/SVCD"s, it is impossible to Achieve exelent Quality with a whole 2 hour movie on 1 CD-r, unless your Idea of Quality and Mine are a Lot different..you can Still do Subtitles with D2V files there is Just a Couple Extra Steps and Pieces of software...

I copied dvd2avi.vfp from dvd2avi folder to tmpg folder and now I have 2 dvd2avi plugins listed in vfapi plugins list. Still cannot open .d2v file.

You're right that 2 hour movies cannot be put on 1 VCD with good quality but I really hate to change disks in the middle of the movie. Once the movie is trimmed (cut intro and end credits) there is not so many 2 hour movies. Quality is acceptable. VBR helps a lot. I know how to make it on 2 or more CD's.

> you can Still do Subtitles with D2V files there is Just a Couple Extra Steps
> and Pieces of software...

There lays the problem. If you stated that the quality si superior when doing things this way, I would try it. But for marginal difference there is no point.

Best regards,
Goran

You need the DVD2AVI.vfp from DVD2AVI 1.76 for Smartripper d2v files. The latest version of DVD2AVI is incompatible.

ASHY

Whats wrong with the latest of dvd2avi, I also went back to 1.76 to try and solve my floating point errors.

The structure of the d2v files has been changed (yet again) so the new version is no longer compatible with the d2v files smartripper creates.

ASHY

Hi all,

I observed that, after successfully multilexing one M2V video file with 2 MP2 audio files (could read the resulting MPG with media player and select each audio track), if I then cut the MPG to produce 2 MPGs (for SVCD burning), it simply drops one of my audio tracks !
One can see that 'Merge&Cut' produces a video stream and an audio stream before remultiplexing them again up the the cut mark. It simply forgets to produce the second audio stream though and obviously doesn't mux it with the others any more !!

Looks like a bug to me, or any of you has a better idea !?

JMS

I"m not sure But it seems that Tmpgenc doesn"t support editing Mpeg files with more than 1 audio track..What I would sugest is to use the Muxer in BBMpeg to mux and edit at the same time, it can cut the file at the File size you specify while Muxing More than 1 audio track and it keeps Perfect Audio Sync were Tmpgenc doesn"t allways keep sync while editing the second part of a Video....

Thanks for this reply.
I've tried with bbmpeg but the produced mux seemed difficult to read back in a player. Maybe I selected some wrong options!? I tried both 'svcd' and 'mpeg2' configuration presets but WinMP could not produce any sound out of this 'mpg' file, and WinDVD (which accepts any type of VOBs and MPGs to be dropped on its window) couldn't switch between audio tracks !! I didn't try to burn them on CD yet, though !

Anyway after one or two more trials, bbmpeg crashed for some reason schrinking my 'm2v' input file to 0 bytes !! (12 hours encoding lost in about half a second - I love it !). I wonder why it needs to open this file for R/W. Read only sould be enough for an input file !!?

Thanks anyway !

JMS

I am trying to run this program on a brand new win xp computer. With 1gb of ramm and a athlon xp 2300 (i think) cpu. i am havin just one problem, since that computer i only have "user level privlages" (its a shared computer) i do not have access to write to the registry and everytimei run theprogram it says i need to be a administrator to have registry access.. i read earlier that i do not need registry access with the version changelog. so what is the work around to advoid this problem, i have a demo copy i download (the brand new version from 1-17) and a older version i bought back a few months ago. both are giving me the same problem. any suggestions or work arounds to get it to work without regisrty access?

There Has to Be registry Access Cuz it writes a Little bit in the registry so it can determine when the 30 days of the trial are over and to not let you install it again..There are ways of gaining access as the administrator without haveing a Password but who ever owns the computer will probably get Pissed...

This doesn't sound right to me. If that's the case most programs you install aren't gonna run. Is this program being run on a work computer?

What's the operating system. Did you install the program under your 'User account'?

ASHY

Every time I try to load any video I get a message saying (can't load p3package .dll) can you tell me what to do.

Thanks,
Ron_pool

Every time I try to load te video I get a message saying (can't load p3package .dll) can you tell me what to do.

Thanks,
Ron_pool

This is Because you don"t have all of the Tmpgenc files in the same folder..ALL of the Files that come with Tmpgenc have to be in a Folder and not sitting on the desktop or the EXE file on the desktop as a Shortcut...

To all experts please help me!
I got a super fast computer and it still takes tmpgenc 4 days to encode a file!
My computer is a IBM pentium II 166mhz 16 megs ram windoze98 I dont see what I am doing wrong.
please help!

Your computer is not a fast computer. it takes me 5 hours to encode a full movie and i have a HP Pentium, 4 1.2 ghz, 128 megs of ram, and i run windows ME. It is still slow and takes long to make a MPEG file.

Simon, Get serius ,Your Computer is about as slow as they come ,You computer is Probably 8 years old ..My computer is Over 10 times as Fast as your Computer and Mine isn"t even a super fast one...I think it is time for an Upgrade...

Simon..................................................If ..........................................your..................................computer......................................is....................................fast................................you..................................probably........................................cant..........................................read.....................................the................other.................answers.............................You....................................should............................be...................................able...............................to.........................read...................................this.....................................though...................................teh.....................answer...............................is..........................to...........................upgrade.

Nice one slippybricks!
Give a break eh?

i try using wizard and get to the point of choosing video and then choosing audio(wav file from virtual dub) at which point it freezes.......what do i do?

Hi experts !
using DVDX 2.0 I ripped a copy of my DVD to make an mpeg2 file

SVCD settings were for PAL, 25 Hz, video bit rate 2000kbit/s audio 224 kbit/s.
Mux rate 5.6%

The first file created had a length of 716782 kbytes

Using TMPGEnc I applied the simple multiplex tool to this file:
I set the input file for sound and video source to this same file.

The output file created had only 676614 kBytes.
that is about 5,6% smaller

Can anyone explain why it is so much smaller? does it have anything to do with the mux rate set in DVDX2.0?

Is some info/quality missing in the smaller file?

How can you calculate the size reduction, is it always the same percentage as this example?

what is the Mux rate?

After using this simple multiplex tool the sound and video were in sync all the time but I noticed some occasional little jerks (every 2-3 minutes) in the sound of this smaller file when played on a standalone DVD player.

By the way, the reason I tried the simple multiplexer tool from TMPGEnc was that the original file (from DVDX) played nicely on the stand alone DVD player except that after pressing fast forward the sound disappeared completely!
The multiplex tool cured this problem.

Both files played perfectly on my PC.

Thanks !

Useing the "Multiplex tool" Removes any Padding the Mpeg stream Might have so after re-MuXing the File is usually a Bit smaller, the ammount of padding varies from just a Few Bytes to several Megabytes depending on a Number of factors..it doesn"t change the Quality or anything like that just makes the file a Bit smaller...The Little "Jerks" every few minutes can be caused By Bitrate spikes, which is very Common with tmpgenc Encoded Files..Tmpgenc seems to Not have very good Bitrate controll and is notorius for Bitrate spikes...

Did actually set the stream type to 'MPEG2 SVCD(VBR)'?

ASHY

Now i understand a little better. Thanks.

In the DVDX2.0 it mentions that the 5.6% mux rate is the recomended value for SVCD (for VCD it is only 1,4%) this is to prevent underflows according to the help.

What exactly would underflow if this mux rate value is too low ?
and how would I be able to tell in DVDX if this is happening?

please note that I didn't encode with TMPGEnc I did that with DVDX2.0

The multiplex tool in TMPGEnc is very fast (a few minutes for 700MByte) I'm sure there is no time for TMPGEnc to do any new encoding during this multiplexing.
Do I still get the "bad" Bitrate spikes after using TMPGEnc just for simple multiplexing ?

Can the The little "Jerks" every few minutes be caused by anything else?

Best regards

You Generally don"t have to worry about the Mux rate if you are doing any Multiplexing with Tmpgenc cuz the Proper Mux rate is set depending on what setting you choose in the Dropdown menu in the Multiplex..Bitrate spikes are caused By the encoder and in Part can be caused by your Bitrate settings..

Hi Minion,
thanks for your comments.
I have seen this explanation of bitrate spikes several times in this forum.
but I am sure that in this case it is completely irrelevant !

As I understand it, if the encoding is set to a variable bit rate then when the picture has a lot of detail and moves fast (like a scene with an explosion) then you need more infomation to encode this with a good quality so the bit rate is set automatically set higher for such scenes. The DVD player might have difficultly keeping up with sudden jumps in the bit rate. OK so far ?

In this case I used a constant bit rate to encode in DVDX of 2000kbit/sec.

In TMPGEnc I used only the multiplexing tool. This takes only 4 minutes.
It is impossible to re-encode the whole 700MByte in 4 minutes.
My machine is not that fast.

That means my resulting file is still using the constant bit rate set originally in DVDX, correct?

So, what can cause the little jumps in audio every few minutes apart from bit rate spikes ?

Best regards...

When I run TMPG on a *.avi file the mpeg video comes out perfectly but I can't hear a thing, have tried all audio setting, newbie what am I doing wrong. Need help with getting audio

Use "Virtual Dub" to extract the audio from your Source file to a WAV file and use that as the audio source...

Learning everyday, thanks for the advise, works great, cheers

what does file stream error mean and how do i sort it

Hi, when I encode a movie using Tmpg the encoded video file never changes from 0 bytes. Does anyone know why this is ??

Thanks

I've just upgraded my computer to a KT333 based motherboard
with a Athlon XP 2000+. I'm using windows 98.
When I'm trying to encode a divx-file to a VCD the
whole computer freezes. No bluescreen nothing working,
not even CTRL+ALT+DEL. It worked on my older Athlon 1,2 GHz on
a KT133 based motherboard running windows 98. Thankful for any helping
responses.

Tmpeenc is the Best

Sorry for first post hit the button..

I think that mo board has VIA chipset if so go to the VIA website and update the latency drivers for Via chipset.. this might be your problem..


MJ.