Is it possible to create a picture show CD to be played in a DVD player (like that from Ulead 'DVD Pictureshow')that has a long narration/sound track - BUT that can have the pictures displayed for differing amounts of time to correspond with the narration.

I don't want to create a simple video file as I want to place as many hours worth of presentation on the CD as possible! (I have 24 hours of Powerpoint presentations to put on the least amount of CDs for mass distribution and I want it accessible to people who have DVD players)

Any other options/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

James

james@tlvp.com

Tmpgenc is basicly just an encoder so any building of files you have to do with a different program(ulead dvd picture show)but if you have the avi file with all the video clips and naration in it tmpgenc will encode it to mpeg but you are trying to get way to much onto a single cd-r, you shouldn"t try to get more than 90minutes of video on a single cd-r and that is with sub-standard quality, and lowering the bitrate to 500 or even 750 might not play on most standalone dvd/vcd players, Most players that play vcd"s are made to handle standard vcd"s with cbr and a bitrate 1150kbs so if you are trying to supply these to a number of poeple then there might be some compatability issues,so I think you basicly want to make a slide show with audio on a vcd, so go check this program out it might be what you are looking for, let me know if it helps.
http://www.xat.com/xatshow/

Also have a look at this.
http://www.techsmith.com/products/dubit/default.asp

ASHY

>Tmpgenc is basicly just an encoder so any building of files you have to do with a different program(ulead dvd picture show)but if you have the avi file with all the video clips and naration in it tmpgenc will encode it to mpeg but you are trying to get way to much onto a single cd-r, you shouldn"t try to get more than 90minutes of video on a single cd-r and that is with sub-standard quality, and lowering the bitrate to 500 or even 750 might not play on most standalone dvd/vcd players, Most players that play vcd"s are made to handle standard vcd"s with cbr and a bitrate 1150kbs so if you are trying to supply these to a number of poeple then there might be some compatability issues,so I think you basicly want to make a slide show with audio on a vcd, so go check this program out it might be what you are looking for, let me know if it helps.
>http://www.xat.com/xatshow/

Only one time period for all pics on this one also (xatshow). The company has plans for the next version to be more versitile!
THANKS FOR TRYING

>Also have a look at this.
>http://www.techsmith.com/products/dubit/default.asp
>
>ASHY


This too creates an AVI file. I can do this with a number of other programs.
I think I really need to retain the Pictures on the VCD and be able to time them to a narration - a timed slideshow. (But I think you get the idea).

Thanks again Ashy

I understand you wish to create a VCD. My thinking was that you could create the slideshow, render it to AVI and then encode the whole AVI to VCD afterwards.

There is one more I came across and this one allows you to create a timed slideshow with features such as fade in/out and allows sound, but not narration, but it does allow the slides to be timed with the sound. It would just be a simple case of recording the narration first and then adding it to the slides.
It also encodes directly to MPEG.
http://www.iomation.com/products/product.asp?ProductID=flyvcd

ASHY

Okay, just when I thought that I'd have a BEAUTIFUL movie on my TV screen, now the sound is out of sync. Here are the specs on the AVI file:

Audio format: MPEG Layer-3, 127 kBits/s, 48,000Hz, Stereo
Video format: 576x256, 148263 Frames, 23.976 Frames/Sec. 114 KB/Sec, Unknown format

The file has a name with DVDRip Vite Dix.avi

The picture and sound look great (and in-sync). I cut the AVI file into two pieces using Virtual Dub, I raised the bitrate to 1500, arranged the screen to full screen (keep aspect ratio), and then converted to MPEG using TMPG (I did nothing with the sound-like uncompressing first). When I viewed each file (first half and second half)...a beautiful outcome. The picture was great and the sound was in-sync. I went to play it on my DVD/VCD player and the words are about 2 seconds behind the lip movement. How can that be? Please lend me your words of wisdom if you have an idea on what I did wrong.

Thank you!!

Is virtualdub telling you there are errors on the video? Same thing happened to me, turned out there were errors in my original avi.

So I guess you encoded the file useing the "vcd ntsc film" template?Plus you shouldn"t burn you mpeg to cd-r at a speed more than half the max speed of your burner.So if you have a 24 speed burner don"t burn at more than 12 times but 8 times or less would be better.The fester you burn the more errors on the disk and de-sync can occur...

I'm actually working on two files. The other one was PAL (which I'm not done with yet). This NTSC Film file I thought would be easy but I was having that problem with sound-sync after I burn. I have a 32/10/40x burner and I burned this video at 16x. So I should burn at 1/2 the 32x or 40x?

By the way, getting back to that PAL file I'm working on, the video and sound look to be in-sync. I haven't cut the MPEG file in half yet, though. Am I bound to lose sync or run into problems when I chop it in half? The only software I have to chop MPEG files is ifilmedit. I chop AVI files with Virtual Dub. The NTSC Film file I chopped in half before I converted to MPEG (since I wasn't dealing with any out-of-sync problems).

As far as the error report from Virtual Dub, there were none reported. I did get a message, however, right when I began scanning for errors that said "VirtualDub has detected an improper VBR audio encoding in the source AVI file and will rewrite the audio header with standard CBR values during processing for better compatibility. This may introduce up to 0 ms of skew from the video stream. If this is unacceptable, decompress the entire audio stream to an uncompressed WAV file and recompress with a constant bitrate encoder (bitrate: 128.0 +/- 0.0kbs)."

Is this my problem? Did changing it to 1500 on the bitrate screw it up? I'm lost! Help!

OK, now that could be where your problem is ,your file had "vbr mp3" audio which tmpgenc will not encode so it changed the header so it would apear to tmpgenc that the audio was cbr, but doing this can cause de-sync,It is allways a good idea to extract the audio to uncompressed wav,but changeing the bitrate to 1500 wont affect sync. you should burn at less than half the writeing speed which is 32 so maybe 12-16 times would be good.You can edit your mpeg files with tmpgenc, go to "file" to "mpeg tools" and there is a de-multiplexor and multiplexor and a "merge and cut" that is where you can edit your mpeg file but make sure you choose the proper format from the drop down menu, but for the file that is out of sync you can fix it, load the mpeg into the "de-multiplexor" and separate the audio and video streams, then load your avi file into virtual dub and go to "file" and "save to wav" this will make a wav file now load the wav file into tmpgenc and choose "audio only" in stream type, then encode the audio, now load the video from the mpeg file and the audio you just encoded from the wav file into the "multiplexor" choose the proper stream type choose the output directory then click "run" now you will have a mpeg file with the audio in sync(hopefully)......good luck...ps: you can e-mail me if you need help.......

Just a couple of questions, does the original MPEG actually play in sync on the PC before burning and is only going out of sync only when you burn to VCD and played on your DVD player or is the burned VCD out of sync on both the PC and DVD player.

Also what software are you using and what version is it to burn this MPEG.

ASHY

I just got home from work and tried playing the disk on my PC and the sound IS in-sync! How weird! It plays fine through Windows Media Player on my PC but is out-of-sync when I play the disk on my DVD/VCD player (through my TV). How do you explain that?

I'm using Nero 5.5 to burn my software.

Make sure that you have the very latest version of NERO as some earlier versions can cause this problem with certain players.
If that doesn't help try using VCDeasy or one that has been known to solve this problem is Instant cd/dvd.
Last but not least, be safe and don't burn your VCD's higher than 4x. Many DVD players can and do have problems with disks burned higher than this.

What model of player do you have?

ASHY

hi, is it true that there is a big output quality difference between tmpgence 2.57 and the rest of the previous versions. Can anyone validate that there is a big quality difference on this version from the previous, if so, then i would want to upgrade to this version.....thank you and have a nice day

I personally haven"t noticed any quality differance with the new 2.57 version, it does seem a little more stable were importing mpeg2 files is concerned.And in the release notes I didn"t notice that there were ant quality optimizations in the latest version but I could be wrong...

I have noticed a huge quality difference, but I am also starting with an MPEG2 source, and as I understand it, the decoder used with 2.57 can be different than previous versions. My only problem seems to be the inability to use the audio gap. Although I might offset the audio by 100ms, it seems to sync it to the nearest GOP.

May I ask why CCE is so expensive compared to TMPG? I looked at their site--CCE SP costs almost $2,000 dollars, while the "lite" version costs $250! eek!

It is so expensive because it is one of the only encoders that supports true multipass encodeing, you can do up to 9 passes with cce ,plus on my system I can encode avi files and twice real time, so a 2 hour movie will only take less than one hour to encode, plus if you know how to use it it will give you unsurpassed mpeg2 encodeing quality, I encode to xsvcd with CCE and the quality is amazing, and you can frame serve d2v files through tmpgenc into CCE and there for use the settings in tmpgenc to encode with CCE..But you are right it is pretty expensive but I guess if you are a persom who needs the multi-pass quality and super fast encodeing speeds it is probably the only software encodeing solution for those specialized needs, the new 2.66 version that is comeing out soon is supposed to be exelent with lots and lots of features, but very few can afford something like that for a hobby...

One of the reasons it is so expensive is because it is a high end commercial encoder and is aimed at professional commercial encoding and production.
You can guarantee that due to the price you will get a high degree of support included.

Also like minion says it is lighting fast and it's MPEG2 encoding is unsurpassed.
I agree it is expensive, but like I say it's not aimed at the ordinary Joe, but more to production studios.

ASHY

The Wizzard no longer recoginizes .m2v .mp2 extentions, and I had to drag and drop to get the files imported.

Since TMpgEnc is written using Borland's Delphi, I would be very happy to supply a code fix, or even a patch :)

Since it appears that the internal code for drag and drop operation actually parses the dropped file to determine the actual file type, it might be cool to add a *.* (all files) entry to the Openfile dialog's filter property :)

BTW, you sure the "T" is for "TSUNAMI-MPEG Encoder" and not because every Delphi object (and many Delphi components) starts with the letter "T"?

BTW(2), this forum fails to recongise my homepage (www.code4sale.com) in the homepage entry section.

Joe Hecht - Former Borland engineer from the Delphi group and current marketer of many Delphi related projects such as TExcellentImagePrinter, TExcellentFormPrinter, TExcellentDIBLib...

I think you might be missing a mpeg2 codec or something cuz I just went and tried it and had no problem, I just had to chose "m2v" from the drop down menu, I tried it with 2.56 and 2.57 plus...

Recognizing m2v files all depends on the MPEG2 codec you have installed. With version 2.56 the MPEG2 codec I used didn't automatically recognize m2v files, but would still open them no problem using the all files option, but now this seems to have been broken with the new 2.57 version.
I don't know what is going on with TMPG now, it seems that more and more bugs are appearing all the time. Each new version seems to have some sort of issue which wasn't there in the old version.

I don't know if this has something to do with TMPG going commercial now because it seems new versions are being rushed out without proper testing. Maybe in an effort to entice more people into buying the product. If this goes on I think people will start to lose faith in TMPG. TMPG used to be rock solid, but the last few versions seem to have been a bit shaky.
I just hope TMPG sorts itself out so we can once again encode in complete faith with TMPG.

ASHY

I'm wondering if you loose quality when you convert to an
mpeg of the same resolution as the input.

I've downloaded some VCD res mpegs. But some of them cause
the following warning when VCDEasy/VCDImager scans them for
VCD compliance.

bad packet at packet #33834 (stream byte offset 78488948)
-- remaining 149536957 bytes of stream will be ignored

And a roughly proportional amount of the VCD burn is blank.

I used TMPGenc (with default settings) on one and it now passes
the compliance checks.

Will this degrade the video? I've seen copy-of-a-copy type loss
when converting other resolutions to VCD res., but I couldn't
spot any here.

Would it make any difference if the input was an AVI of the
appropriate resolution? Rules-of-thumb on conversions vs.
degradation would be appreciated.

Thanks

Any time you compress a source to mpeg there will be some quality loss,It might not be visible to the naked eye but it is there,The reason you are getting "packet" errors in vcd easy is probably because the files are mpeg1 not vcd files, mpeg1 has a different packet size than vcd/mpeg1 and different header information.But an easy way to make regular mpeg1 files into vcd/mpeg files is to just run the mpeg1 file through the "merge & cut" with the "mpeg1/vcd" option in the dropdown menu, then it will rewrite the header information and re-align the packets to make it vcd compliant, re-encodeing the mpeg file will make you loose a lot of quality cuz the bitrate used to make vcd"s is"t very high and not nearly high enough to give you optimal quality pluss re-encodeing the file will make you loose more quality...

I agree with minion. Simply re-multiplexing these files may correct the problem.
If it doesn't then why re-encode the whole thing and lose quality. Just demultiplex the file, cut out the video part which has errors, re-encode with TMPG and the join it back together with the main file and then re-multiplex with the audio. Saves time and preserves the quality of the rest of the movie.

ASHY

Thanks to both of you.

Merge & Cut worked and was just what I was looking for.

Hi!

DV source is interlaced, and MPEG2 also does interlacing, so why is it that when I encode directly from a DV source AVI to DVD-PAL MPEG2 the compressor produces a terrible result (lots of artifacts).

I experimented, and enabled de-interlacing (using the double filter) and all of a sudden the quality improved drastically, all the artifacts went away, only now, the result looks like... well.. like its been deinterlaced.

Am I doing something weird here? I was under the impression I could compress from a interlaced source, to a MPEG2 with the same interlacing, being as the framerates are identical and the field order is correct.

But when I do, the interlacing ends up causing huge bitrate wastage, like its trying to compress data that is interlaced, and therefore doesn't fit with the MPEG image assumptions.

..belial..

Have you tried changing the field order under the Advanced tab?
ABS

Yes, that caused massive flickering as well as even worse quality loss.

It seems like (not that I'd know for sure) that instead of compressing the 2 interlaced frames of the DV into the 2 interlaced frames in the MPEG2, that its taking a single frame of the DV source with interlaced lines, 25 times a second and compressing it, and well, it ends up looking hideous and artifacty.

I've given up for now and I'm compressing using deinterlacing because I have to have this DVD available before our next show, but I will be experimenting with other compressors, I have no idea what else is out there though, but something should be able to do this right.

Hi,

I have seen this question asked a number ot times and
answered as "newbie" question and brushed aside. But I
think this is really a serious problem.

First of all I have version 2.55.38.142.

Here is what happens.
1) I set video source file to be a.mpg
2) It loads the file, everything works (I
process/encode it)
3) I change settings (for example, change
bit-rate) and try encoding again; I get
the dreaded
"file format not correct or not supported"
error.
4) I change the source file name from a.mpg
to a.mpeg and once again everything works
fine.
5) After a random number of encodings (between 1
and 4 so far -- I am trying out various encoding
settings on the same source file to see which
works best!), the error message appears again.
6) Changing the file name from a.mpeg to a.mpg
and it works again.

I think one can repeat the above a number of times.

First of all, if the file could be read before, how
come it suddenly becomed "unsupported"?

Next,just changing the file extension suddenly makes
it "supported"?

Finally, in my version, I can not change the priority
of VFAPI plug-in. It does not allow me to change it
(is at -1 and stays there no matter what I try).

Anyone can throw more light on this? Or is this
a bug? Maybe I am doing something wrong?

Thanks..


- Hirendu

I personally haven"t come across a mpeg file with the "mpeg" extention all the ones I have come across have a "mpg" extention, so if changeing the extention solves your problem then It seems like a pretty simple fix, as for changeing the priority of the vfapi plugins you do it by Right Clicking on the plugin you want to change and if you can"t change it then it is probably a bug and you can try downloading another copy, there are other ways for encodeing mpeg files to mpeg files with tmpgenc, you can de-mux the mpeg file and load the "mpv" video file into dvd2avi and frame serve the video to tmpgenc and load the de-muxed audio in for the audio and then encode.

I recently bought a license to 2.56. I downloaded 2.57, but I don't see the "register" button on the splash window anymore? What gives?

Do I just replace the 2.56 vfp with the 2.57?

If the registration window doesn't appear then your origional registration, must have been entered into the windows registery. From the Pegasyse website:
>Those who have purchased previous version of TMPGEnc Plus are free to upgrade to this version, 2.57! Just download this version and run the program please.

Otherwise the registration window would appear. So just use the software.

Griff

Grif is right, usually if you are entitled to a free upgrade the new version will register it self..

Do I just replace the 2.56 vfp with the 2.57?

So I just ignore the "XX days to registration message"?

If you really purchased TMPGEnc Plus, you got e-mail which contains
how to register, or where to download etc.

If your product is registered then you wont have a "splash screen" ,you said before that there was no place to register but the splash screen is were is should have the "register" button, I have a funny feeling you downloaded the "demo" no the "plus" version, you can only register the "plus" version and the "plus" splash screen will have a "register" button abd will say you have 14 days to try the product the "demo" version will have a splash screen with 30 days to try the product, and if it is registered then you won"t get a splash screen.The only place to download the "Plus" version is at the "pegassus" web site ,you can get there by clicking the banner below....

Ok, I don't understand why this site doesn't have the plus download as well. Thanks for the help though!

BTW it automatically did registered like you said, just downloaded the wrong one. Cheers!

I downloaded an AVI file of Spiderman that I thought I converted correctly to an MPEG file. It did make it to an MPEG format ,but when making the VCD in EZCD Creator, it said that the following were not acceptable: Audio Layer, Audio Bitrate, and Audio Pack & Padding. It did say I could still make a data CD, but not playable on a VCD or DVD player. Do you have any idea what when wrong and how to fix? Thanks!

It could be because you made a mpeg file not a vcd file, or you made a non standard mpeg/vcd, ezcd creator will give you are error if your mpeg/vcd file is just a little out of specs, the audio has to be 224kbs at 41000hz mpeg1 layer2, and the video has to be 352 by 240(ntsc) with 1150kbs, and the packet size for a vcd and mpeg1 are different, This might work if you just encoded the avi file to mpeg1 instead of vcd, just go to "mpeg tools" to "merge and cut" and load your mpeg file into the merge and cut choose your output directory choose "mpeg1/vcd" from the drop down menu then click "run" then it will make a copy of your file but it will attach the proper headers for vcd, then try makeing a vcd, but ezcd creator sort of sucks for makeing vcd"s cuz it will allways give you errors when trying to burn non-standard vcd files, I would sugest "Nero" or "vcdeasy" for burning, but if you want to do menu"s and chapters I use the "ulead dvd plugin" plus it lets you make non standard vcd/svcd"s...

I used the new 2.57 on my standard SVCD test clip, and wow! What a quality difference. I dont know what changed (aside from reading from DirectDraw) but my output is now visually very very close to DVD quality.

I would like to see a feature added to the MPEG Tools. When multiplexing, it would be nice to be able to adjust the audio gap.

Thanks!

Joe

Hey,

When i am encoding, i keep getting this msg ' -537403781 361968 ' every seconds. This is my first time, can anyone help!!!