Hello,

I encoded NTSC video using TMPGEnc. I burned the resulting MPEG-2 file onto a DVD-RW and viewed the video using a set top player and a production monitor, which I carefully set up using PremiereÃÔ NTSC colour bars; the bars were fed to the monitor directly from the timeline, using an RCA-BNC cable.

The MPEG-2 video, viewed from the DVD-RW/set top player on that same monitor, is much darker than the original AVI video (viewed from the timeline).

I tried disabling the ÅÐutput basic YCbCREoption in TMPGEnc and re-encoding, and while it certainly improves it, it is still darker than the original AVI.

Can anyone help?

Thanks,

Tom.

@tom101

I had this same problem. I finally solved it by letting AviSynth do the color conversion instead of the avi codec.

TMPGEnc accepts RGB24. If you source is not RGB24, the avi codec does the conversion. Some codecs are not good in the conversion and you end up with washed out or darker looking colors.

Here is a very basic AviSynth script.

AviSource(put file name here)
ConvertToRGB24()

If your AVI file is interlaced use
ConvertToRGB24(interlaced=true)

This worked for me.

VideoGuy

Any experiences?
(I have only dvd-rom in pc...)
As long as you want?
No limits at all in svcd specs?

As long as you like. There is no limitation apart from the quality aspect.

i wanted to know is...is it possible just to put the VOB files...the movie part excluding the rest of IFO and BUP files into Author and make into DVD???will it recognise it properly???????

Yes...

I am evaluating TMPGEnc 2.520.54.163, and trying to split a mpeg file.

I select MPEG2 - SuperVideoCD, that is the option I generated the file, add the file, and, allways, when I push Edit bottom the program abort.

My system is Windows 2K SP4, and the file system NTFS.

Any sugestion?

Try raiseing the Priority of the Mpeg2 Decoder in the Vfapi Plugins, this might help...

Hi, I put it the first one and the problem remains. Thank you.

Hi, I put it the first one and the problem remains. Thank you.

Well Then i would sugest that you Use a Different Mpeg editor...

Hi, I have fix the problem!!!. I do not know why, but I can tell you how. :-)

Following your advice I began to look for another editor. I have tried several, but at the end I have downloaded and installed Moonlight-Elecard MPEG2 Video Decoder kit ver 2.0. After that I have tried again to split the mpg file and then, it worked!!!.

Thank you. If you have some explanation of that it will welcome.

Isn't it possible to produce some usable output from the search engine?
I find it very hard to use.

I agree with you.
It use to be a lot better. The old search engine would simply bring up old posts in the same format as the regular posts, but when Pegasys took over distribution of TMPG they went and cocked it up by using this crappy search format.

A few questions for the experts over here:

- Does anyone know where to find software to analyse a VBR mpeg1/2 file?
I wanna know how high a bitrate is produced by TmpgEnc
- what are the min/max bitrates in the (S)VCD books for MPEG1/2 VBR.

Thanks,

Hendrik

I found some answers on this page:

http://www.vcdimager.org/pub/vcdimager/manuals/0.7/vcdimager.html

The movies I make for VCD 2.0 cd's are MPEG1 VBR. I burn them with nero
and the play fine on my standalone DVD. But they are not supported
by the VCD 2.0 standard?

My CD - MPEG1 VBR (2.2 Mbit/sec)
VCD 2.0 - MPEG1 CBR (1.1 Mbit/sec)
SVCD 1.0 - MPEG2 VBR (max 2.6 Mbit/sec)

I am confused. Can someone tell me what is going on?

Cheers.

I found some answers on this page:

http://www.vcdimager.org/pub/vcdimager/manuals/0.7/vcdimager.html

The movies I make for VCD 2.0 cd's are MPEG1 VBR. I burn them with nero
and the play fine on my standalone DVD. But they are not supported
by the VCD 2.0 standard?

My CD - MPEG1 VBR (2.2 Mbit/sec)
VCD 2.0 - MPEG1 CBR (1.1 Mbit/sec)
SVCD 1.0 - MPEG2 VBR (max 2.6 Mbit/sec)

I am confused. Can someone tell me what is going on?

Cheers.

What are you confused about.
Like you say your MPEGs are not VCD 2.0 standard. So what? Your DVD player plays them, so what's the problem. DVD players are not VCD players so why should it be limited to playing the VCD 2.0 standard only. DVD players are VBR machines by design so it only makes sense that they can handle VBR MPEG1 movies.

http://www.tecoltd.com/bitratev.htm

Thanks for BV.EXE. Now I can finaly analyse if TmpgEnc uses the max bitrate I give it for encoding my movies.

I found that a too high VBR bitrate caused choppyness in DVD movie playback, both in sound and picture. Am I pushing my standalone DVD decoder chip to its max? Now I can see what has realy happened during mpeg encoding.
I set my max VBR to 4000 for mpeg1, CQ 75 to 80. I will see.
Thanks again.

It isn"t the really the Decoder chip in the DVD Player that is Limiting the Bitrate in your (S)VCD"s it is the Fact the the DVD Player can"t spin the CD-R fast enough to Read the Data at a High Bitrate so the Choppyness from Bitrate spikes is because the DVD Player is not able to Spin the Disk fast enough, and a Max or 4000kbs for VCD might be to high for a Lot of Players as the VCD standard is only 1150kbs and if your DVD Player can play SVCD then it might have a Faster drive in it so your VCD"s should be able to handle at least 2500kbs But It probably can"t go up to 4000kbs and if you DVD Player doesn"t play SVCD"s then it most definately will not to play VCD at 4000kbs ..If you have Problems playing files on your DVD player at 4000kbs Max then you should lower it to maybe 2500-3000kbs and if you are worried about the Quality then raise the Quality slider up to 75 or 85%..Tmpgenc has pretty Bad Bitrate controll and it spikes up higher than you set it so it is a Good idea to keep the Max down.....Cheers

Can I put "Detect Scene change" option on, if I want to do standard svcd?
Or do svcd need unchanged GOP?
I've understand that DSc adds more i-frames, if needed.
Right?

thanks, toke

Can I put "Detect Scene change" option on, if I want to do standard svcd?
Or do svcd need unchanged GOP?
I've understand that DSc adds more i-frames, if needed.
Right?

thanks, toke

Yes use 'Detect scene change'
Actually you should use this option in most cases, VCD,SVCD,DVD.
It simply places an I-Frame and begins a new GOP where the encoder detects a scene change.

Ok, so with svcd, dvd, vcd, etc. you can cut GOP whenever you want and start a new one with i-frame? GOPs don't have to be complete?

What do you mean complete?
What do you class as a complete GOP? Do you mean the GOP doesn't need to have the maximum amount of frames it is set for.
SVCD and VCD have no limitation in the GOP layer.
DVD is limited up to 15 frames per GOP for PAL and 18 for NTSC. The GOP doesn't need to have this amount of frames, this value is just the maximum that is allowed in the GOP.

Ok,
thanks a lot.
I have somehow been in belief that all these disc formats have fixed length of GOP.
So, it is possible to make eg. i-frame-only dvd video that is totally compatible with all standalone players as long as one keeps datarate in its limitations (9,8Mbps)?

btw, tmpgenc's help says:"NTSC DVD is restricted to a maximum of 36 frames"
So is it 18 or 36 and in PAL 15 or 30? Or are people just mixing fields and frames?

To be honest with you I have no idea why it says this in the TMPG info. I think it's an error and means fields. The limitation for DVD is definitely 15 for PAL and 18 for NTSC.
Here are some specs: http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/DVD/Book_B/Video.html

what does an I-Frame do?

An I-frame is used as the basis for every other frame in a GOP. It contains all the important data that makes up an image. The data in an I-frame is complete whereas the data in subsequent frames only contain data in the image that has changed from the previous or next frame.
This is how MPEG compression works as the frames only store data that has changed rather than the complete image. The decoder does the rest by working out what should have been in the frame by the data the I-frames contain.

An I-frame always begins at the start of a GOP and also an I-frame is usually created at a Scene change because the data in that scene has changed from the one previous so an I-frame is inserted so the the rest of frames can be encoded correctly.
An I-frame is harder to compress than other types of frames because because it contains more data, so it's not advisable to create an I-frame only MPEG unless there is some special reason for doing so.

I've got a movie whose AVI filesize is 699MB. I've exported the audio to a WAV file which is 92MB. I've used TMPGEnc and selected the original AVI as the video and the WAV as the audio (obviously). I'm using the wizard as I'm new to making VCD's and at the end of the process it shows that the output file is going to be approx. 1 GB! I've tried playing with the settings but nothing seems to decrease the file size. I'll take screenshots if anyone needs to se what I'm doing.

Sounds right for MPEG.
You need to split the movie between 2 disks.

>Sounds right for MPEG.
>You need to split the movie between 2 disks.

I was really hoping to get it to fit on one disk. Maybe it's time to step up to DVD authoring. Thanks.

Have you tried opening the file in virtualdub? know it sounds silly but I get this error a lot. Virtualdub will tell you its a problem with the vbr (or something) just save the file as a direct stream copy and load the new file into Tmpg

Richard I think you misunderstand the question. There is no error in the file.
This is just the final size the MPEG will be. The size is dependent on the length of the movie not the size of the original.

I got the impression that Jasmoe4 is trying to make a Xvcd since he mentioned the wizard. I know a vcd uses 1150kbits and therefore you can only get about 80 mins on a 700mb cd. I just thought I'd contrbute with something I'd learnt.

@jasmoe4: you can get up to 2 hours on a CD-R. Try www.molevcd.de
I use it always but don't expect DVD quality. More VHS I would say. But I can live with that ;O)

Cheers.

Hey lennyp75,
I probably have the same Panasonic as you have & I've also been trying to convert an SVCD with header trick, but have not had any success; wasted quite a few cds in the process. Have you had any luck since and if so would you like to share it? I've tried doing what Minion suggested in his reply to you, but still no luck. I guess I could just go out & buy another player that plays SVCDs, but that would be too easy.

I love to use TMPGEnc to mux my elementary video file with ac3. It gives excellent results with no problems on my dvd. I am wondering if there is any experts who can advise me if there is any utility to force TMPGEnc to accept dts files for muxing as well? I simply love DTS sounds to AC3- robust and more fidelity. I really hope the folks at TMPGENC can come up with a DTS version as well in future.

If you are burning to ordinary CDR and not DVD I'm very surprised that your player even plays MPEGs with Ac3 let alone DTS.
I'm afraid your gonna find that those disks you have made with Ac3 won't work on most other players. I hope your DVD player doesn't fail because when you buy a new one it's likely your disks won't play in it so your gonna be left with a s..t load of unplayable disks.

As for DTS and MPEG there is very little chance even your player could handle this unless burning to DVD.
I guess you would need a DVD authoring package for DTS muxing, but which one is capable I don't know.

DTS and AC3 are 2 Totally different Audio formats, ac3 can be Muxed to a Mpeg video file pretty Easilly useing BBMpeg or Mpeg2VCR But DTS is a Different Story I don"t know of any muxer that Accept DTS but there are a Couple DVD authoring Programs that will accept DTS like DVDLab but that is just for DVD"s, Even if you could get DTS in a VCD or SVCD the Chances your DVD Player will Play it is Next to nill, and AC3 in a SVCD is Possible as My Player will Play them but only on CD-WR But it is hard to find a Program that will Burn SVCD"s with AC3 or DTS for that Matter...

I know I am already asking for trouble by using a non-standard size, but I have a number of animations I ran which I later encoded to MPEG using TMPGEnc. I could have outputed the frames in a more standard size, but since my intention was not to use it on anything but my own system, I chose to leave the image sizes at 800x600. I used only the standard settings from "System (video only)" to do the encoding.

The problem that came up occured when I tried to play them. When playing it in Windows Media Player it produced a series of dotted pink lines on the right edge. Quicktime converted and played them correctly with no visible problem, until I switched to another window, then it showed the same problem as in Window Media Player. Real Player was imho worse, wraping the image around so that the same band of the movie that was mucked up in Media Player was wrapped over to the left side. :p It also wouldn't play in the full size in that anyway, but since I don't use Real Player, I really don't care about that one.

So, is there just something inherently screwed up with WMP and Quicktime that causes these odd colored lines or is there actually some setting I can use to fix it? I suspect, from the act that Quicktime only does it when running in the back ground, that this is just a problem with the way they get played back, but one can hope. ;) lol

I don"t really know what it could be but any time someone starts talking about Pink discoloration on an encoded file with Tmpgenc I think of the Angel Potion codec, Check you system for this codec and delete it as it causes a lot of problems it might be listed in your device manager under video codecs as "apmpeg4v3.dll"...and the only other thing that might help is to Raise the Priority of the "Direct Show file Reader" in the "Vfapi Plugins", this has helped with bad color before...You should try outputting as a Standard Video Resolution like 720+480?? Just a Thought...

Your problem is likely your resolution. MPEG resolutions need to be in multiples of 16 or you will get aspect errors which manifests itself as the problem you have encountered.
800x600 is not a correct resolution for MPEG. It needs to be 800x592 or 800x608, so you need to resize it in TMPG to this resolution.

Hmm. Well I do have an apmpeg4v1.dll in there, so that could be one source of the problem. Now if I can just figure out how to get rid of it. lol

And as for the size issue. 800x608 is reasonable I guess. Didn't know about that limitation..

Thanks.

Well that IS the "Angel Potion Codec" that is most likely the Source of your Problem, You should be able to delete it in your Device manager....