I have just started converting an avi file to ntsc vcd, this appears to be creating an mpeg file, but how do I get this to play on my DVD player? I can play video cd's, but they are usually in avseq01.dat format when I explore them. Help would be greatly appreciated. TIA

Use Nero Burning Rom and select VCD.

Thanks very much, I appreciate your help.

I was wondering if I could change the bitrate to a lower rate. With the Wizard it automatically chooses the "CBR 1150kbps 70min/650MB" and there is not other option. If I can lower this bitrate to maybe 800 or 900, then it may be possible that I can get the whole movie on one CD right? How can I change this bitrate (VBR)?

You need to learn the "standard of MPEG-1".

There is no VBR on MPEG-1 standard.

http://www.kvcd.net

Thanks for all your help. However, please view the new problem I posted. I'm still having trouble.

I have a 1.8Ghz comp., with a Pentium 4. I tried to convert an avi (565 MB) into an mpg and it says that it will take almost 24 hours to do that. Why is this happening? It had only finished 4% in 1 and a half hours. That is really slow for such a fast computer. Is this normal? How come some other people say they finish theirs in about 1 and a half hours and mine is only 4% done?

I have recently doubled performance by adding some memory. going from 256 mb to 512 mb doubles encoding speed. adding more meory doesn't significantly increase further.

Problem is, with a fast cpu you still have memory access as the speed bottleneck..

I have recently doubled performance by adding some memory. going from 256 mb to 512 mb doubles encoding speed. adding more meory doesn't significantly increase further.

Problem is, with a fast cpu you still have memory access as the speed bottleneck..

There is difineatly something wrong with you configuration cuz on my 800mhz p3 system I can encode a 2 hour movie to mpeg2 in 7-10 hours, try deleteing tmpgenc and re-download it maybe that will help.....

I tried redownloading it, but it still does that. How can I configure it to where it does it faster?

I have no Idea how to configure your system to work faster I think there is something wrong with it cuz it seems to be encodeing at the speed of a 400mhz,The only thing i can think of is maybe raise the amount of "virtual memory" you have and make sure that you direct memory access controller is enabled(DMA).and make sure you have directx8.But that is all I can think of, maybe get someone to check it out for you......,

Hi,

Could anybody give me some indication what the different deinterlace methods do? (even, odd, double and animaption, adaption and animation adaption?)

I would think for the best results you should try to integrate both fields so double (animation adaption) sounds logical, it does not exist....

I presume even and odd methods just leave half the fields out, does this mean I could use half the cbr bitrate??

ok dory'
i was woundering as a greate fan of TMPGEnc, would there be any release of
a TEMPGEnc that will support all *.AVI files and mpeg 2[with the plugin built in]...

as this would make it lot more easyer' for us #=)

thanx for thaking your time

dizzy

That is easier said than done, makeing the mpeg2 plugin is easy enough but to make tmpgenc compatible with all avi formats is nearly imposible cuz you need permision to decode someone elses codec, say for instance tmpgenc was able to encode avi"s that are encoded with the "pinnacle dv codec" pinnacle would get pretty pissed off cuz then you wouldn"t need the pinnacle mpeg encoder, most every compression format is pattened or copyrighted so you need permision or pay fees to decode there format,but tmpgenc is compatible with all the major codecs like all the direct show formats all the video for windows formats and open DML formats as long as you have the codecs installed on your machine...

Hi, I got the error "Illegal MPGE video stream" when I was trying to cut a movie .dat file and convert it to many .mpg files. I didn't have this error when I was cutting the file from eg. 01:11:00 to 05:00:00 When I try to cut eg. 12:12:00 to 15:15:00, the problem occurs, this happen quite often when I use MPEG Tools. Is there a way to solve this problem or it's the problem of my source file eg. .dat or .mpg ? I tried to convert the .dat to .mpg and then do the cutting again, the problem still occur. Pleae advise. Thank you!

It is probably both , the mpeg tools have been getting a lot complaints lately so the advice i give to people is to get something else to do the job, get a different mpeg editor or different multiplexor ect, cuz there isn"t much you can do when the mpeg tools say they don"t want to work for you...

I'm using a 640x480 Avi DviX4 as Source... and for the life of me I can't find a way to get my "Souce Aspect Ratio" and my "Video Arrange Method" to produce a Letterboxed (OR) Full Screen finished file that doesn't A: Look streached or B: Clip the Left/Righ edges off (sacrificing Minimal Action but Significant amounts of the Subtitles).

I've tried:
1:1 VGA | Both Center Keep Aspect Ratio and Full Screen Keep aspect Ratio 2
16:9 & 16:9 Display | Both Center Keep Aspect Ratio and Full Screen Keep aspect Ratio 2
4:3 NTSC | Both Center Keep Aspect Ratio and Full Screen Keep aspect Ratio 2

Am I missing Something??

What are you trying to make ? A vcd,svcd,dvd? you have to realize that vcd" and svcd"s have lower resolutions than your avi file so there is allways going to be clipping of the frames going on and to get the whole screen to fit into a smaller area you either have to squish the frame to fit or you have to cut off some of the frame.With dvd"s the resolution is 720 by 480(ntsc) so if you were to use your avi file for dvd then it would get stretched to 720 from 640 ..but what you can try is see if your dvd player will play full resolution svcd/vcd"s(xsvcd/xvcd) then you can play your files with the same resolution as your avi file on your dvd player but these are not compliant with svcd/vcd specifications but some players will play them, mine does and they look awesome, allmost like the original dvd.......

You shouldn't really lose anything in the resize as TMPG should automatically account for the resize and adjust it accordingly as long as you choose the correct parameters.

Imagine each pixel is a brick and a wall you are building is the image. Lets say this wall(image) is about 6ft wide and 4ft high. You can use small bricks or large bricks to build this wall, but the resulting size of the wall will still be 6x4. The resulting wall will have more bricks (pixels) if you used small bricks or less bricks (pixels) if they were large bricks.

This is the same as pixels in an image, you can use more pixels or less pixels to build an image.
Letsd say your AVI uses 640x480 pixels to build this image and then TMPG converts it so it only uses 352x240 pixels to build the image. The output will look exactly the same because the same amount of information from the original is now stored in the smaller frame size, but due to the lower amount of pixels(lower resolution) there will be less detail in the image as it is lost in the larger pixels.
This is how resizing works and not by removing or cutting anything away.That would be cropping not resizing.

With a 640x480 source this means that the aspect ratio is 4:3. So you should choose the source aspect ratio as 4:3.
If you want the film to look exactly the same as the original you need to choose 'Fullscreen(keep aspect ratio)'
This should ensure the output fills the screen without any gaps at the sides and has the same aspect ratio as the original and doesn't look stretched or squashed.

Also make sure the output aspect ratio is set to 4:3.

You shouldn't lose any information at all this way and should be more or less the same as the original except it will be whithin the chosen output frame size.

ASHY

I theory that is the way it is supposed to be but I can never get all of a 720 by 480 picture in a 480 by 480 space, no matter what setting I use in the video arrange method,unless I squish it, most of the time you wouldnt notice the sides being cut off untill you have stuff like subtitles then you can only read the words in the middle,I must of encoded "Crouching tiger hidden dragon"30 times trying to get all the subtitles to fit, no luck......

Strange I have never had this problem, I have already encoded the movie you mentioned and it came out perfect.
Also I have just checked a movie to see if any of it is cut off and as far as I can see there is no difference. No loss what so ever.
As a matter of fact I usually have to clip in a few pixels as there is a very slight black line at either side. This is usually the case with all my movies.

So I would have a look at your settings Minion as it seems there is something amiss somewhere.

The settings I use are:

Source - 16:9 Display
Full screen(keep aspect ratio)
Output - 4:3

ASHY

Maybe it is just the way my dvd player plays them ,I dont know but i solved the problem by encodeing my mpeg2/svcd"s at 704 by 480 resolution, and they look exelent....

I have a very large DVD libary I a DVD rom drive and a HP DVD 200i writer I would like to make backups of these DVD's I am not sure how to go about it. I have smart ripper and nero burning software but have been unable to make copies is there something I need to do to make my backups?

What you have to do is rip the dvd with "smartripper" then use "dvd2avi" to extract the audio and make a d2v project file then encode the d2v file to a mpeg file then burn it..That is the short way of explaining it, but beware that "HP dvd burners" are notorius for burning non compliant dvd"s and there is a big lawsuit going on right now against "HP" for there dvd burners....There are manuals that will tell you how it is done and probably betterways to do it to at "vcdhelp.com".....

I am a new user of TMPGEnc. I aim to use it to move analog avi files onto Video CD.
My first sample file converted fine. However, all other AVIs are displayed in preview, and in the output .mpg as black. Playing the avi in media player works fine. Any ideas?

The input avi is 25pfs, 360x540 24bits, compressed with the Studio DC10 codec.

Thats a "pinnacle DV codec"? the dv codec in pinnacle is not supported in tmpgenc, so you have to capture useing a different codec or better yet un-compressed avi, but for codecs Tmpgenc" is only compatible with "Direct show" formats "Open DML" formats and "Video For Windows" formats so you will have to use a different codec....

>Thats a "pinnacle DV codec"? the dv codec in pinnacle is not supported in tmpgenc, so you have to capture useing a different codec or better yet un-compressed avi, but for codecs Tmpgenc" is only compatible with "Direct show" formats "Open DML" formats and "Video For Windows" formats so you will have to use a different codec....

Hi ,
I have the same problem with black screens ! ,but how can I change the codec for pinnacle DV ? could u please tell me ?

best regards :)

Well you should have other compression formats(codecs)to choose from in "pinnacle" but if you don"t you will have to "uncompress" the dv file or compress it to a format that is supported in "tmpgenc"....

I have used TMPGenc to convert 2 avi's to mpg's successfully. Files were about 680 mb each and last about 1hour 15 munutes.
I have another avi file (9695 MB, 1h16) that I want to convert to mpg. However, the program indicates that the file is very much over 1h16 minutes and would not fit in a 80 minute CD. It says it will take 5 hours to encode, whereas it took about 1.5 hour for each of my previous movies. And after around 1.5 hour, there is an error message. Il tried to read the mpg file that has been created. There is no sound to this file.
Anybody can help me with this issue ?

Only solution I can think of is to split it into two parts, I've had to do this before when converting 1:30:00 Avi files to SVCD. Simply use Source Range to encode the 1st portion then encode the next part starting from about 20 frames behind where the last part ended. It's worked fine for me (Kinda brings back Laser Disc Flashbacks having to switch discs) but watch for Audio Gaps!

To encrease speed I have enabled DMA setting on my Western Digital UDMA 7200 min-1 40Gb harddisk.

But when I playback or caprure new movies the sound is terible. Metal sounds peeps'are there.Creating MPG file with TMPGenc is better not good. DMA disabled all works perfect..

Is there a sollution that I can enable DMA and have good sound?

I don"t think haveing "DMA" enabled should make much of a differance when it comes to encodeing cuz the amount of information writen to your hard drive is not a lot especially considering that it takes hours to encode a movie...

Another thing you can try is to encode your audio seperately from the video then multiplex them together ,just an idea......

problem solved after placing cd rom drive master en HD slave (dma enabled)

You shouldn't really have your CDROM drive on the same channel as your HD. This will slow down your hardrive.
Most CDROM drives work in ATA 33 mode and if your hard drive is on the same channel it will also be dropped to ATA 33 mode.

Why don't you put your CDROM on the secondary channel?

ASHY

Has anyone noticed that using 2-pass vbr causes the machine to lock up
consistently? I've tried several times to encode with this, but every time,
it just locks the machine so that I have to press reset to recover.
Has anyone else noticed this?
-Don

Yes I have the same problem but not only with VBR, other modes also. I posted about this two days ago here and on vcdhelp.com and it seems no one has an answer for this problem... it seems to be a bug. I managed to work only with an older version 2.53 and otherwise by loading failsafe BIOS settings (this hampers speed though). Do you by any chance have a XP+ CPU? It seems people with this problem are using AMD.

I am using AMD, 1.4Gb., 526 mb Rams, 2 hard disk drives, 40 gbs each.
I had the same problem before. After I increased the Virtual Memory from 2,000 mbs to 3,000 mbs, the problem disappeared. I plan to increase the Virtual Memeory to 5,000 mbs in my next projdect, just to see how smooth it will run .