I'm testing tmpgenc during the 30 day trial. First project I want to tackle is the creation of new setup screen for my dvd player.

I extracted the mpg2 files from firmware. Opened in tmpgenc and sequenced to bmp file.. looks great.

edited my bmp file using MSPAINT (very simple change, I'm testing). opened bmp file in tmpgenc and save to mpg2...

no matter WHAT settings I change, the resulting mpg2 file is extremely bad looking. Lots and lots of jpg-type compression loss. I should have enuf horsepower to do this, Win2k on a P4- 1.5 GHz...

what am I doing wrong?!

maybe try to encode your "bmp" images to avi then try to encode them to mpeg,I have done simular stuff with "cool 3d" I make animated trailers for my svcd"s in "bmp" then convert them to avi then encode them to mpeg useing the cg/animation setting in "tmpgenc".Maybe this would work for you....

Are you using a high enough bitrate for the conversion.
I have converted bitmaps to MPEG once or twice and they have come out perfectly.
So make sure you have a high enough bitrate set when converting.

Also what player do you have. I'm interested to know how you extracted the setup screen from the firmware and how you are able to change it.

ASHY

recently, I was working on Titanic...and I noticed that the audio track
disappears entirely in TmpgEnc! I used DVD2avi to produce the sound track, but when I go to encode in TmpgEnc, there is no audio.
However, when I use Dvd2avi on the VOB files 2 at a time, then encode in segments, the audio is fine.
Has anyone else noticed this with long movies?
cheers,
Don

Sometimes audio problems like this can be solved by getting a different audio encoder like "toolame" or "scmpx" thes encoders work with "tmpgenc" as the "external tool" in the "enviromental settings".You can find these encoders on any search engine......

Are you saying that there is no audio after encoding the movie with TMPG or are you saying the wav file that DVD2AVI creates has no audio.

If it's the former then I find this unusual.
A workaround would be to encode the audio separately with TMPG and then multiplex it with your movie.

ASHY

Thanks a bunch, ASHY for the suggestion/info on CQ as opposed to CQVBR or 2Pass. I hadn't tried CQ because I was under the impression that the CQ was more for when high quality was necessary and file size wasn't an issue.

Using CQ with quality set to 70 and max bitrate set to 5000, I was able to get results that were almost identical to the 2pass settings I mentioned earlier without the 18-hour encoding time. It wasn't even necessary to enable softening.

Loading the test file (of the same scene) in BitRate Viewer showed much more variation in the bitrate than CQ_VBR had given.

Just as I would have expected.
Like I said the 'CQ' setting gives much the same result as the 2 pass when viewing with Bitrate viewer and usually produces smaller file sizes and better quality than if you were to use the same settings in 'Automatic VBR'.

ASHY

Sorry, I meant to say you "must" use Elementary streams -- no "Program" streams (i.e. video & audio within a single MPEG file) are allowed in ReelDVD.

while trying to convert an avi file to mpeg , tmpeg gets so fasr through the process then comes up with this error , i have scanned the file for any nreadable sectors with vitual dub , and all seems fine , could anyone shed a little light on this for me please
thanx

just tried my 1st svcd, wasnt sure if dvd plays it, it did. picture went from top to bottom but only half way across. i had my aspect at 4:3 i must need to change something but not sure what. thanx

Make sure the "video arrange method" is set at "full screen (keep aspect ratio)" and your movie should look as close the the original size as possible...

I have an audio problem when I transfer my video from my DV camcorder to my computer through the 1394 port and VideoWave software. Video is OK. Audio is not continuous. When I do the transfer, there is nothing I can do for audio setup. I checked the audio is 32 KHz, Stereo and 16 bits. I would appreciate it if anyone could give me help to solve the problem.

Hi there,

If you use the wizard for this.........Don't!
You just go to the main window and click the LOAD-button.
There you have several files (.mcf).
If you choose one of those there will be no more problem.

Greetzzzz,

chris

Are you talking about transfering your dv movies to your computer? does this question have anything to do with "tmpgenc"?please be more clear....

Nothing related with tmpgenc program. I do talk about the transfer from DV camcorde to computer.

Then you are in the wrong forum........

Everytime I try to rncode using version 2.54 Plus, the system hangs and have to reboot!

What could be the reason and how to avoid it?

> Everytime I try to rncode using version 2.54 Plus, the system hangs and have > to reboot!

You haven't given much info. What OS are you using? Does the system hang at exactly the same time when you use TMPGEnc, or at some random point while encoding? Is it one particular file you're trying to encode that's causing the problem?

I had problems a couple of weeks ago with TMPGEnc 2.53 on my XP system. Ocassionally it would stiff the machine. In the end, I found that lowering the CPU clock speed sorted it out completely, now everything is very stable even with TMPGEnc chugging away in the background.

Liam

Thanks,
I am running WinXP on P4 1.7, 256 RDRAM. te problem is random at different times and with different avi files.
How do you lower the CPU speed?

I happen to be running TMPG plus 2.54 on Win XP using a P4 1.7ghz processor overclocked at 1.9ghz and 256mb of RAM so I find it hard to believe it is your processor speed.

Does this happen with only 2.54 plus?
It could be you have a corrupt version of TMPG plus 2.54 if it only happens on this version.

What is your motherboard and have you tried updating it's drivers?

ASHY

Also, the same for Video.

What are the differences?

Basically 'Audio only' creates an audio file which contains only audio information which can be multiplexed with a video file.
Whereas 'System audio' basically creates an MPEG movie with only audio info contained and the required headers.

ASHY

So what kind of information will a the system (Audio) headers contain?

I don't know much about headers....thanks for the help.

Basically to tell the player it's an MPEG movie without video, the bitrate, length, playing time.

Don't get confused though this won't make a compatible MPEG VCD movie which will play in a DVD player, VCD requires both Video and Audio.

ASHY

From the main window I set the option to 'Audio Only' and then changed the sample rate to 64kbps. I created a batch list of four projects, each one differring in the Audio channels - one was in Mono, another in Dual Channel, J-Stereo and Stereo.

But the results were all the same size files.....why?

When played in Winamp only the Mono file sounded different, and that was only noticable when you listened caregully!

Thanks.

When encodeing 64kbs for audio is hardly enough to make a signal,and some dvd player won"t play audio with such a low bitrate,but the reason that they are the same size is cuz you used the same bitrate,just because the audio is sterio or mono or whatever doesn"t change the fact that the audio is the same bitrate in each instance,the bitrate is split to each chanell in sterio and the bitrate is all in one chanell with mono ,it isn"t say 64bks for each chanell ,it is that bitrate for the whole file.....

Oh I see......So 64kbps Stereo means 32kbps per channel, whereas in Mono it means 64kbps for 'both channels' (since they are the same).....correct?

I don't intend to play the files in a DVD player, I just wanted to reduce the file size on my comp since the sound qual was poor and it was encoded at 224kbps (hence wasting space).

Thanks for the response.

Also, your post would explain why only the Mono channel sounded different in WinAmp.

Thanks for the enlightenment.

Good one Minion.
Exactly the way I would have put it.

Like you say 64kb/s is 64kb/s whichever way you encode.

ASHY

Everytime I try to rncode using version 2.54 Plus, the system hangs and have to reboot!

What could be the reason and how to avoid it?

What's exactly the "motion search precision", does it change for the video quality, and can we change other options(bitrate,rate control mode...) to have a better quality for a VCD(to play with a DVD, not with a PC).
Thank you and excuse me for my english. ;-)

I have a DivX which I converted into 2 SVCDs. Unfortunately, the audio gets out of sync with the video. This only happens gradually. The beginning is fine.

The source DivX is in sync.

What goes wrong here?

Thanks!

There are a few reasons that this can happen,like encodeing to a different frame rate as the original avi file,or sometimes it seems to happen for no noticeable reason at all, but what you can do is de-multiplex your mpeg file onto two seperate audio and video streams and check the length of your audio file and compare it with the length of your video file, in most de-sync cases the audio is a little longer than your video, so you get a good audio editing program like "cool edit" and shrink (or stretch) your audio track til it is exactly the same length as your video track then "multiplex" them back together..this should fix your de-sync problem....

Indeed, the audio part is 1:48:08 long and the video 1:48:21. I got this by extracting the audio from the DivX (avi) file using VirtualDub.

You suggest to demux the mpeg. Since I have no mpeg available yet (just the original yvi format (DivX)), is it possible to extract the audio from this file (just like >I did already to find the length of the audio), to stretch it using CoolEdit, and then to use this as audio source with TMPGEnc?

Thnaks!

Another question I have ... VirtualDub says that there is a preload skew of 6000 samples (0.14s with 44100 Hz). I<does this mean that the audio in this source file only starts after the video part played already for 0.14 seconds?

TIA

Actualy I have no Idea what it means,I rarely ever use virtuadub,but you can use "cool edit" to shrink the audio file so that the audio and video is the same length, then load the audio and video in "tmpgenc"...but even if it does mean that the video plays for 0.14 of a second before the audio plays that is such a small amount if time it wouldn"t be noticeable,it is like 1/7th of a second....it should work for you, and if you don"t have "cool edit" you can download it on "kaaza"......

Virtualdub is giving you that information because whoever created the AVI file has included the skew correction when they multiplexed the AVI with the audio probably because, as you say, it was out of sync.

If the AVI plays in perfect sync from beginning to end with the skew correction which the creator of the AVI has added then this is same thing that you should only need to do with the MPEG.

You can add this with TMPG directly when you encode, but is not advisable because it is difficult to know if it is right.

A better solution is to encode the audio separately and use BBMPEG to multiplex the video and audio together using it's A/V sync feature which allows you to set a delay to either the video or audio.

If virtualdub is correct and the original AVI is in sync then you only need to add a delay of 140 ms to the audio when multiplexing.

If the avi isn't in sync then the skew is either wrong or as Minion says it's due to the length, but in my experience even though the length is different it's usually the skew correction which you need to set not the length of the file.

ASHY

I didn't know that the "Preview Skew" was set manually by the person making the avi. Do I have to think of this skew as permanent offset? This would mean that the offset of 140ms remains constant through the entire movie. Is that correct?

I checked the avi creating the sync problems now more in detail. The movie starts fine (no offset or a minor offset [possibly the 0.14s]). Then, after about 3 minutes, I have all of a sudden 6 seconds (!) offset. The audio is ahead of the video. As mentioned already before, the DivX avi plays back fine with the Windows Media Player without any missing audio part. Once TMPGEnc encodes it to MPEG, the offset occurs! Also when extracting the audio portion of the avi to a wav file, the offset exists.

I gradually gained the impression (not sure !!!), the the audio part of the file is at that playe, where the offset occurs, somehow corrupt. However I wonder why the Windows Media Player manager to play back to DivX avi file properly.

Any further help would be greatly appreciated!