is there a way of getting better quality on the destination mpeg as i have some brilliant avi's but once converted onto cdr they are bity and quality is poor (images made of visible rectangles) i am recording the cdr's at 2x so that shouldnt be my problem

There are a number of things you can do, the main one is to raise the bitrate as much as you can while still creating a reasonable file size that will fit on 2 cd's.
You could try encoding in VBR using the CQ method.
Change the motion search precision to 'high' or do a 2 pass encode.
If your DVD player will allow you could also increase the resolution, but remember the higher the resolution the higher the bitrate needs to be.

ASHY

>is there a way of getting better quality on the destination mpeg as i have some brilliant avi's but once converted onto cdr they are bity and quality is poor (images made of visible rectangles) i am recording the cdr's at 2x so that shouldnt be my problem

What format of mpeg are you converting the avi files to? If it's mpeg 1 for VCD, and you're using a hardware DVD player, you're stuck with a constant bitrate. If you're converting to mpeg 2, and using a software player on your PC, then play around with the CQ settings. You could try doing a 2-pass encode, but from my experience the 1-pass CQ method gives better results.

Griff

Lets not start an argument about this Griff, but you may not realise that most DVD players will happily accept VBR MPEG1 VCD's.
DVD players are Variable bitrate machines by design and as such will accept VBR files in MPEG1 or MPEG2 format.
I myself regularly use the VBR CQ method of encoding for VCD and so do many others on this board and I agree it usually gives better results than a 2 pass VBR.

Trendym I will send you some CQ templates which should improve the quality of your MPEGs.
I have sent these to many others on this board and haven't had any bad reports about them, so give 'em a shot and see what you think.

ASHY

Hi Ashy

I to have been testing 2-pass VBR encoding.

There are two implementation of 2-pass supported by TMPGEnc Plus (2-pass Old type and 2-pass). Have you noticed any diffeence in quality between the two?

I am interested in CQ-VBR encoding but I have no idea how to acurately pre-determine the file size prior to encoding. Could you please send me these templates as I am very interested in the method. (saving time while increasing quality).

Cheers

Arnnie

Ashy

I read that you have CQ-VBR templates that work on stand alone players. Could you send those to me? I've been trying different settings and its getting pretty frustrating. It will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

They're on their way.
What are you encoding to MPEG2 or MPEG1?

There are two things you need to know if you have problems with the templates.

MPEG1 - If the VCD templates don't work correctly try changing the minimum bitrate to 300 kbps and enable padding as some players have probs with anything below 300 kbps.

MPEG2 - If the SVCD templates don't work correctly you may have to reduce the maximum bitrate to 2600 kbps. As above some players are fussy about bitrates.

ASHY

Hey Ashy,

I guess a lot of people is having the quality problem and im one of them. Can i also have those templates you were referring about.

thanks

i copied m2v video plugin into tmpgenc folder. i can open m2v file but audio file cant load when i try to encode it. any idea?

If the audio is mp2 why do you want to re-encode it? It's not necessary.
Just encode the video then multiplex the audio with it when finished.

ASHY

thanx for ur reply.how can i check whether the m2v file is svcd compliant? cos i can check mpg file with ezcd creator' video compression.

What do you mean?
If you encode it with the correct parameters for SVCD and then mutiplex it with the audio and then load it into EZCD creator it should tell you if it's compliant.

ASHY

let say i want to encode audio stream to 224 bitrate but i donno the video & audio bitrate of the m2v file. wat should i do?

Running the latest version of this s/w, and wanting to simply convert an AVI
downloaded from the web onto a VCD format. Hence in input-video and input-
audio boxes, both show same .avi filename. The output box is writing as a
.mpg file. On every file I convert - even those recorded myself with a
webcam - the resulting mpg file has sound, but no video (just a blank/black
screen).

(There's no preview available either during conversion)

I've looked at FAQ's, and old posts, and see problems with no audio, but
none with no video! What am I doing wrong?!

Neil

Actually this one has been answered soooo many times already and more or less gets asked every day, but here goes again.
Go to Option>enviromental setting>VFAPI plugin and right click the 'direct show multimedia file reader' and raise it's priority to 2 and the rest to 0.

ASHY

That fixed it. I did try finding a previous query on this - but obviously not for long enough! Thanks Ashy.

Hi, I have accomplished making a VCD, but the only problem is that the audio is very low. I have to turn the volume on my TV to very high in order to hear properly. Any suggestions on how to fix this problem???

In the audio tab go to "settings" and you can change the volume of the audio of the file being encoded you can do simple effects like fade in and fade out too, since your file is allready encoded you could de-multiplex your mpeg file and encode the audio in tmpgenc with the increased volume settings and multiplex it back to a mpeg file..

I had the same problem. TMPGEnc audio boost (in audio tab of settings) set at max boost just barely increased the level enough. A better solution, one that can raise the audio to the same level as on the the DVD, is NERO WAVE EDITOR (it comes with the NERO package - download a trail version.)

Before using TMPGEnc, open the .WAV file in NERO WAVW EDITOR, SELECT ALL from the edit drop down, then boost the audio level by around 20 DB and click on save. You can determine the correct amount of boost by listening to the DVD and then listen to the audio level in NERO WAVE EDITOR and change the boost to sound about the same (I found that a boost of between 16 and 22 DB, depending on the DVD, was about right).

If you change the audio level more than once in NERO, be sure to UNDO in the edit drop down - otherwise the changes are additive.

This is a common problem when ripping DVD's to VCD or pure audio. You need to normalise the sound. Dare I say this on this bulletin board, but Flask Mpeg will let you normalise the sound.

Griff

If you are using DVD2AVI then this is your problem.
For some reason DVD2AVI rips the audio to a lower volume than the original.

I use a program called VOB2AUDIO which will rip the audio to more or less the same level as the original.
It's also a bit quicker than DVD2AVI and more accurate due to it's use of directshow filters and can solve the sync problems sometimes associated with DVD2AVI.

ASHY

Let me know if you managed to solve this problem. I have the same problem too with my TMPGEnc Plus :

>TMPGEnc Plus unable to open file says
>"cannot open or unsupported" but file is able to open and play
>in Windows Media Player 7.1 using DirectX8.1 and Matrox G550
>dual-monitor video drivers 8.52. Microsoft DV PAL AVI file was
>made using Adobe Premiere 6.01. Problem only occur after
>installing DirectX 8.1 but that cannot be uninstalled.

Their response was:
Please change the setting of the TMPGEncPlus VFAPI plug-in.

"option$B"*(BEnvironmental Setting$B"*(BVFAPI Plug-In"
$B!&(BAVI2(OpenDML) File Reader
$B!&(BDirectShow Multimedia File Reader

Please replace these priority.

******
Unfortunately, it didn't help. May I ask if you are using DirectX8.1??



Jen

I'm using TMPGenc version 2.56.39.143 on Windows 2K.

I'm trying to encode mpeg1 for a VCD.

I have an avi file that was a capture from a miniDV recorder which is about 1 hour long. When I try to encode it with TMPGenc, it encodes the first 4 minutes and 47 seconds and that's all. This happens no matter what I do with the "source range" setting (turn it on, turn it off--doesn't matter). In fact, in the source range setting dialog box, it only reads in the first 4:47 (or 172251 frames).

The same thing happens with three different avi files.

Any ideas?

No idea why this is happening, but you could try loading the file into virtualdub and framserving it to TMPG.

ASHY

I have no problem converting to MPEG2, but after it is converted, the picture is upside down. Is there an option I am not seeing? Please help!

There are two possibilties for this.
One is that you have the wrong AVI codec installed. You need to find out the fourCC code of the AVI and post it here.
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/avifourcc.html

The other reason is that it could just be a media player problem. Media player isn't the best choice for MPEGs, so install a software DVD player such as WinDVD and try it with that. ftp://206.112.112.158/p008/Enu/WinDVD.exe

ASHY

I am trying to convert a movie from an avi to a vcd when I am encoding and when I am done there is no picture yet there was picture before I began whats wrong?

I have a *.AVI movie and lives in europe, I want to play the movie on my dvd-player BUT it´s only for PAL.
(the dvd player is a stationary, not a "computer-dvd-player")(the dvd-player).
What shall i do? I need to convert it from NTSC to PAL, how do i do that?
(It´s a .avi-file)

PLEASE help me!!!!

See this post. Question - Finished MPEG-2 SVCD has repetative stutter No.101

ASHY

No.24513

Why on Avi(source my own camera) to Mpeg-1 is my video and sound not in sync
Virtual Dub with Divx Codec works ok
Avi2vcd is Ok: This is what it says
Frames per second: 29.965689
Length: 25842 Frames
Duration: 14 minutes, 22 seconds
FilterGraph: Color Space Converter : AVI Splitter : Source :
INDIVIDUAL FRAME DETAILS:Width: 320 Height: 240 Bit depth: 32
AUDIO DETAILS:Format tag: 1 Channels: 2 Samples Per Second: 22050
Bits per sample: 16 Average Bytes Per Second: 88200
Mux: S:64690, V:49342, A:10596, P:4752, Min:-9604, Max:4796, TPP:0
Mux: p[0]:21893, p[1]:8187
Tried Tmpgenc with and without wizard no luck!
Dont understand audio gap setting in milliseconds?
Can somebody help please

Your frame rate is not normal.It should be 29.97 or 30 if it's NTSC.

I am using the frame server from videotools.net to render my films directly from Adobe Premiere to TMPGEnc. Everything works very smoothly until the encoding is 99% complete and then TMPGEnc reports the following error:

"Write error occurred at address 004028E1 of module TMPGENC.exe with 00902704"

The resulting .mpg file is audio only no video. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. FYI, I am using Premiere 6.02, Video Server plugin v0.93 and TMPGEnc 2.56.

Thanks,

Rodney

Can I use TMPGEnc to encode a sequence of bitmaps with file names indicating the frame number (001.bmp, 002.bmp,... etc.)?

Yes. Just load the first and each bitmap mwill be encoded in sequence.
If TMPG doesn't encode in sequence go to option>enviromental setting>VFAPI plugin and right click the BMP/PPM/TGA/JPG file reader and raise the priority to 2.

ASHY

I have converted several AVI movies to SVCD PAL with these settings: Non-interlace, Video source: 1:1, Video arrange Method : Full screen (keep aspect ratio) etc...

When I play the finished MPEG-2 in WinDVD or others, the movie has a repetative stutter where it slows for a moment, every second. The picture and sound seem to stay in sync, but the file has this constant stammer.

When I play the AVI in WinDVD, it plays perfectly.

Is there a process or option I need to select to cure this?

I use a P3 733Mhz proz

Thanks

You have probably changed the framerate from the original AVI.

ASHY

ASHY,
Thanks

Yes, my AVI file has Fram Rate : 23 frames/second.
And under MPEGs setting / Video tab, the frame setting is locked in 25 frames/s. Is it this one I should change to 23 (and how ?), and will that resolve the "stutter" problem ?
Also, will the finished SVCD play on a normal DVD player ?

Thanks in advance

If you wish to play the MPEG in a country which uses the PAL system you will have to keep the framerate 25fps.

The only way is to change the framerate of the original AVI.
First you will have to extract the audio to a wav file using virtual dub.
Load the AVI file into virtualdub and extract the audio to a wav.
Next change the framerate to 25 fps. When you do this note the time in the box at bottom right exactly and then convert it to seconds. WRITE THIS DOWN, you will need it later.

Close Virtualdub and download Cooledit 2000.
open Cool edit 2000.

When the program opens you will be presented with a box allowing you to choose 2 options. Choose options 1 and 3.

In the program click file>open and open the wav you created earlier.
Wait for it to finish then click 'Edit' and untick 'enable undo' then click 'select entire wave' next click 'Transform' and choose 'Time/pitch' from the drop down menu then click 'stretch'
In this box tick the following options:

Low precision
Time stretch (preserves pitch)

In the box that says 'Length' type in the exact figure you got in secs from Virtualdub for e.g. 4802.360 then click ok.
Wait for the program to do it's stuff then when its finished click 'file' then 'save as' and name and save your file as a wav.

This should give you a Wav file which will be the same length as the movie in the next step. Close Cool edit 2000.

To change the framerate of an AVI all you need is this program.
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/avifrate.html

Change it to 25 fps then load your AVI and your new wav into TMPG and encode as normal using the SVCD PAL template.

Note: you may check that the audio is in sync with AVI by multiplexing the files with Virtualdub first.

ASHY