Hi There,
We ussually generate frames with fields from 3D programs and compositing programs. These images do have frames either odd or even.

But when generating DVD MPEG 2 and writing to DVD-R we allways have problems with the fields.

What is the correct field setup for DVD - PAL
we generatie 720x576, we encode in the highest possible frame-rate. Normally the animations are only 3 to 5 minutes.

We used Perception PVR hard-disk recorders to go to Betacam with even fields.

We switched to DV and used odd fields.

Please help.

Thanks,

Omar

If you use the "Wizerd" in Tmpgenc it will analize the file and adjust the field order accordingly......

Hello everyone.

This has probably been asked many times before, and i am sorry about this
but i would like suggestions on how to extract the sound from a divx file and convert it to mp3 ^^;;;

I love the ending theme of a series and i want it in mp3 (can't find it on the net ^^;)

Any suggestion appreciated, thanks in advance.

You can do this with "virtual dub" you can find the program on any search engine.

By the way, I tried your suggestion about my "metallic" sound I had from my divx files. It didn't make things much better. The problem is that the sound file are 8 bits. Do you know a program that could make the sound better when converting to 16 bits???

Thanks again,
Nico...

Is the audio 8 but mono or 8 bit sterio, there are programs that will make it a 16 bit audio and clean up the audio but they aren"t freeware, a good one is "Sonic Foundry Sound Forge" it will let you do pretty much anything with audio with that program but it takes quite a while cuz it is very thurough, you can download the demo of the latest Sound Forge 6 at there web site, it is probably www.sonicfoundry.com but it is I think about $600 to buy it but it does video stuff also and encodeing .....

Hello All:

I'm very new to encoding and I'm a little confused by everything, I've managed to make a couple VCDs that seem to work fine but I keep having problems with others.

Currently installed on my system: VCDEasy latest version, BBMPEGs latest version, TMPGEnc v. 2.57, and WinDVD

1st Q: I have downloaded various .avi files using kazaa. Only a couple of these files look as good as .mpg1 files, and none of them are longer than 45 mins. When I try to convert to mpg, there is no change in quality, despite the fact that the size of the .mpg file is much bigger (about the size of most VCD files I have also downloaded using kazaa). Now for this one particular file I've been trying to fiddle with the FPS is 29.96 and I understand I have to do something to the bitrate but I am unsure what exactly I have to do (if I raise it, how much should I raise it? How much is too much?). I have looked on www.vcdhelp.com but can't seem to find info on my specific problem. The audio and video play fine, just not at the mpeg1 quality. ANy help please, perhaps an "official" tutorial?

2nd Q: I downloaded a .qt format file and I want to put it on a vcd but TMPGEnc won't recognize it and the latest version of discreet's Cleaner would only convert the first 15 seconds. Is there a way to make this work with TMPGEnc or do I need to look for the file in a different format?

3rd Q: I've been trying to make SVCDs too but it seems like the file sizes are too big, even for 80 min CDs. How can I tweak them to make them fit or do I need more software and hardware?

Thanks to anyone who answers for their time and attention, I look forward to using TMPGEnc a lot more in the future,

Rod

I guess you are really new to this,and I don"t really know were to start.ok,when you encode a avi file to mpeg the mpeg will never look better than the avi file you encoded, so don"t expect the encoder to make your mpeg file look better than the avi file.In general you would have to put a full movie on 2 cd-r"s in mpeg1/vcd format and 2-3 cd-r"s in svcd format and your mpeg file will allmost allways be bigger than the avi file unless the avi is un-compressed.Never Fiddle with the frame rate this will usually ruin your mpeg file, you have to encode to the frame rate of the avi file so if your avi has a frame rate of 25fps then you use the "Pal vcd" template, if your avi is 23.9fps then you use the "NTSC Film vcd" template and if your avi file is 29.9fps then you use the "NTSC vcd" template, and if your avi has a frame rate other than these you will have to find the template the most closely matches the avi frame rate but you will get choppy playback with these files..To raise the quality of the mpeg1 file you need to raise the bitrate but doing this will make your mpeg file larger but if you raise the bitrate to say 1650kbs then you will get about 60minutes on a 80min cd-r, if you wan"t to encode QT files you will need a Quick Time Plugin you can probably get it in the tools section of VCDHelp.com and most consepts of encodeing are explained on the web site also.There is so much information to learn before you get a full grasp of encodeing that it would take a month to explain it all so read all you can at vcdhelp .com and another good site is www.doom9.com (I think that is it)...Good Luck

Thanks for the help minion! I know there is a lot to learn and thank you for clearing some issues up and getting me on the right road. Take care.

"The audio and video play fine, just not at the mpeg1 quality"

From one "newbie" to another: perhaps your expectations are too high? In my experience, when I make a VCD from an MPEG file of a TV show, the VCD is always a bit inferior to a standard VHS copy made from the same TV show. (Let's say "SMALLVILLE" for example. The VCD will be more blurred than the VHS tape. In fact, for the most part, VCDs never seem as clear as the original avi file played on the computert. Because of this I have spent much of my "video hobby time" with anime and American animation, such as PIXAR productions. Cartoons make fine VCDs, but unless there are tricks I haven't learned yet (and there are, I'm sure) it seems impossible to take a film with 352x240 resolution NTSC and make a VCD that will look like a tv broadcast when shown on your livingroom tv.
Hey guys - if I'm incorrect on any points let me know too!!!

You can if the source is good and you crank up the bitrate realy high like to at least 2000kbs or higher......

You guys have always given me good advice. I intend to buy a Video Capture card tthis week. I am using a Pentium 3 running at 933mgz. Windows ME. I went to VCD Help and read the reviews there, also NY Times in Tech section 2 weeks ago had some info. Given that Circuit City has priced them at $150. apiece, is one notedly superior or easier to use than the other? Ati All in Wonder Radeon 7500 vs Win Tv Personal Video Recorder (PVC)

Being able to record a TV show AND work on other computer projects at the same time is not an issue.

The All In Wonder Radeon 7500 would probably give you the best quality but where I live they are 3 times the price as the Win TV PVC, What i would do is to buy one of them and if you don"t like it then return it and try the other one but I think the Radeon will probably be the best....

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/MVR1000/pm_mvr1000.asp

That board in the link above is quite expensive and there are software encoders that can encode at twice real time with as good or better quality but then again they cost more than twice what that board costs but software is easier to aquire than hardware.

FFast, thank you for that link. I looked at the canopus website and I liked what I saw, but it's really way out of my price range at the moment.

I use almost exclusively the 352x480 Plus template, and indeed, I get 90+ minutes for every CD. So I use it because I can get every movie that's around 2 hours in 2 CD's. Has not failed once!. The new Skvcd is worth a try too. I have used CVD and SVCD's, but now I'm trying out the Skvcd template. It looks just as good as a SVCD, but you can fit over an hour on each CD. They put a new sample yesterday on the download page where the templates are.

--Jim

I forgot to put the link where the samples are.
It's http://www.kvcd.net/dvd-models.html

--Jim

A file has 25 fps and 151.520 frames in total. While loading it into TMPGEnc, the Source Range shows a max. of 181.824 frames, which is exactly 151.520/25*30.

The loaded settings are SuperVideo (PAL).

Why is TMPGEnc not showing 151.520 as max. frames in the Source Range?

TIA

I was just wondering if anyone else has a problem with TMPGEnc always freezing. I have TMPGENC plus but i cant barely use it because it always freezes. I have a 1.6 gig pentium 4 with 256 DDR memory so it shouldn't be a problem. No other programs freeze, just this one. Does anyone else have problems with this?

The only time I have ever had problem with Tmpgenc freezeing up is when i try to encode WMV files but other than that it has allways ran smoothly for me, I have pretty much the same system as you mines a Intel 1.7ghz 400mhz FSB 256mb-DDR-Ram, these is probably a conflict with Tmpgenc and some other software on your system, There have been reports that some Ulead products can have an effect on the performance of Tmpgenc, are you getting any error messages? What would probably work but would be a really big hassle would be to do a clean install of your OS, or what might work and what has worked for me to fix system problems is to use "Norton System Works" to scan your system for errors and fix them, this has solved many problems i have had in the past.....

my tmpg-enc always freezes too when about 70-80% of the film is converted. haven't found any solution but would apriciate every help I can get. think it might be some kind of codec-problem? using tmpgenc2.53 on a P3 550mhz with lots of HD and 256meg ram.

Thanks for the help! I'll try the Norton thing. I also have a problem with the sound getting worse on the encoded video. Do you think that could also be a conflicting problem?

After a series of email exchanges with Kenzi at Pegasys (difficult at best since English is definitely not his primary language, and I do not speak Japanese at all), I think we have established the problem I've been seeing with TMPGEnc Plus.

According to Kenzi, who ran some tests, Quicktime video that is imported via the QTREADER.VFP plugin, is reported to TMPGEnc as running at 600 fps -- regardless of its actual framerate. When TMPGEnc converts this to 29.97 fps for DVD, frames get repeated every couple of minutes due to the fact that 600 and 29.97 are not evenly divisible.

I did a little research and it appears that the plugin was written by a James Hoderness (see http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/4942/svcd.html) as freeware. Holderness evidently does not wish to be contacted by anyone, and has no email address or contact info anywhere on the Internet. Consequently there is no way to tell him the plugin has this problem, there is no way to get it fixed, and there is no way to obtain the source code so someone else can get it fixed.

The problem for us is that the video we're trying to encode is coming out of a $150,000 Avid Symphony edit system, which is based on Quicktime. It can output AVI files, but there is a 2GB limit on an AVI output from an Avid, which amounts to about two minutes of video, plus it takes nearly as long to output an AVI as it does to render the MPG file itself, so it's effectively useless. We don't get enough call for DVD work to have it make sense to buy an expensive encoding solution -- I do maybe three or four custom DVD's a year, for corporate videos to be used at trade shows by clients. I'm trying to avoid paying $thousands for another solution, since TMPGEnc Plus creates terrific looking files if this one bug could just be fixed.

If anyone has dealt with the author of the quicktime plugin, or has any other suggestions, I'd be most grateful.

Pete

Can you not export Targa frame sequences from the Symphony?

>Can you not export Targa frame sequences from the Symphony?

Sure you can, but it's not practical: the export would be about 1MB per frame. At 30fps, a one-hour export would be 1.8GB per minute, or 108GB for a one-hour program. To say nothing of the export time. And the fact that the export is IN ADDITION TO the video already in the edit system, on the drives.

The way the Symphony is designed to work, when you "export" a Quicktime, the export is actually a little file -- about 100K -- that contains pointers into the video that's already inside the system. So if you have 150GB of video spread across four drives, you're not doubling that amount by copying it into another file; you're just exporting a reference to it. With four 70GB drives, I don't have enough storage to have video inside the edit system AND export a huge file like that.

And what's killing me is that it ALMOST works. TMPGEnc can read the file and does a beautiful job of MPEG2 encoding. But due to the fact that QTREADER doesn't accurately pass the frame rate, there's a hiccup every couple of minutes, and that's enough to make the file unusable, at least as something you could send to a client. (My DVD projects are typically edit projects that would normally be copied to VHS tapes, but if a client wants it to run endlessly in a kiosk at a trade show, they want a DVD because it can be programmed to loop over and over again). If QTREADER was a commercial program, I'm sure I could prevail on the manufacturer to fix it. But it seems that it was written by a reclusive author who doesn't want to support it.

Pete

After installing the new registered version 2,57 using xsvcd format I get streaming errors when creating svcd from divx files every time.

I basicly use svcd but change to cq 2500 @85% and 704x480.

This could be caused by the divx files them selves,I used to get that same error when I used to download movies off kazaa, or I would get a "floating point decimal" error, It seems that when downloading large files off kazaa they seem to get corrupted through the long downloading process,I have no idea if that is where you got the files from it is just a guess from the error you are getting but what you can do is load your file into "virtual dub" and "scan for errors" and it will tell you how many corrupted frames there are in the file(if that is the problem)..If you wan"t to make good quality xsvcd"s that are trouble free then the best thing to do is get a DVD-Rom and start ripping, you can get one for about $50-$75 or less.......

These are DivX movies and the problem seems to be on all systems that have Version 2.57 . What setting would you adives me to use for DVD rips.

I think I currently use:
704x40
CQ min 1250, max about 1800 (padded)
Motion set to normal

All files and all systems say streaming error, but only after new update was installed.

I do mpeg2 files with the same resolutions but with different bitrate settings, i usually use a minimum of 500kbs and a max of 5000kbs with a quality of 85-100 with no padding and can usually fit 50 minutes on a cd-r with good quality but I use the high quality setting in the "Motion Precition Search"..I don"t encode Divx files anymore so I don"t know if there is a problem with Divx and the 2.57 version...

You state to use "Motion Precition Search" due you mean "Motion Estamate Search" .

Would you recomend setting changes of:
704x480
CQ 500-5000 (NO padding)
Full screen

Anything else?

I have a video in asf format,i tried to convert it normally using the wizard and the file got converted but after the completion of conversion,the file has no tag,lt isn't in Mpeg format,what to do?please help me.

What do you mean that it isn"t in mpeg format? if it doesn"t have a file extention give it one, just rename it to "movie.mpg" then try to play it with your software mpeg player, and if it doesn"t play you might need to encode it to an avi file then encode it to mpeg, I have been able to encode small asf and wmv files but I have had problems with large files with the resulting file just being a black screen, I don"t think asf and wmv are fully supported in tmpgenc, there is a very cool little program called "Stoik video converter" that will encode your asf and wmv files into avi and if you use a lossless mjpeg codec or uncompressed avi then you won"t loose quality, you can find it on a search engine.....

I encode videos that are avi and mpeg. the video comes out great but the sound gets fuzzy after each session. i tried using the encoded video with the original sound source but the sound still gets fuzzy. everytime i encode a video no matter what the format is the sound is bad and worse than originally. I dont know what to do and i dont understand most of the settings under the audio tab. Please Help!

bannana

After I cut a 735MB MPG file into two parts........the first part has sound...but the second part doesn't have sound.......Am I missing something..
can anybody give a suggestion.........Thank you so much!

The best advice I could give you is Use a different mpeg editor, you can try a couple that are in the tools section at http://www.apachez.net/

Hi,

Just wondering, which settings do you use for Pal? there are two?:
1)4:3 625line(Pal)
2)4:3 625line(Pal704x576)
The thing is that none of these are 720x576 which is the standard Pal setting.
ReelDVD(DVD software)has problems with these dimensions and asks for 720x576.

Just tell me please which one of these are used most commonly?

Thanks
Edith

Those are aspect ratios they don"t have anything to do with the frame size, it just aranges the movie so it will be played correctly on your TV but does not change the resolution, you change the resolution in the video settings but if you choose the "Pal DVD template" you will have the correct resolution for Pal....

Both 704x576 and 720x576 are used for (PAL) DVD authoring. I'm suprised the DVD authoring package won't accept 704x576, but it's no big deal as there's no difference in picture quality between the two, so just use what it'll accept.

Griff

Hi Edith,

Make sure the file you are feeding ReelDVD is an .m2v (video only stream) and not a .mpg. Either enable the "Video Only" setting or if you have already encoded 720 or 704 x576 .mpgs, use the simple demultiplex tool in the MPEG Tools, to extract the m2v stream.

Richard

The only problem I have with .m2v video is the last of audio.

When I encode .m2v files there is no audio included.

Is this correct?