Finally got DivX/AC3 AVI to convert

[LSchafroth]

I've been trying to covnert a DivX movie to XVCD for soem time. I've had nothing but trouble. I ether had great pciture, but the sound was missing, or the sound was great but hte picture was jumpy and the sound would start to chirp.

Then the video & sound were perfect, but were out of sync.

All the guide here say to seperate the video and audio, so that is what I was doing. I found another site that said NEVER seperate them unless you absolutely have to, so I figiured I would try that.

The AVI is 704x272, 23.xx fps and AC3 audio.

I loaded the AVI into VirtualDubMOD. Selected Direct Stream copy for Video and Full Processing for Audio. I selected NO COMPRESSION PCM for the audio and saved teh AVI & Audio to a new AVI file. Went from 712Mb to 1.2Gb.

I then loaded it into TMPGEnc Plus and selected VCD Film (NTSC) from the wizard and loaded the new AVI. I unlocked the template.

I changed it to Constant Quality with a setting of 85 with max of 1450 bit rate and amin of 300 with padding if needed.

I changed to Full Screen (Keep aspect ratio) since teh file is a 16:9 file.

The file was 1.25 hours long. I had 3 files to do. Each one took 33 minutes to encode.

I used to use other applications during encoding, but the other site said never do that or you will get sync issues with TMPGEnc. I decided to test that and when I used email and browsed the web durign an encode, boom out of sync. When I left the system alone during the encode, perfect.

I burned the CD at 4x and it works perfect now.

So, the jist of the long boring post is this: Do we trust the guides here or do they need to be revised?

Lannie

[funkguy4]

Don't dis the guides, it's usually the user who is doing something wrong.

Try the guide in my signature, then author with VCDEAsy or something.

[ZippyP.]

I used to use other applications during encoding, but the other site said never do that or you will get sync issues with TMPGEnc. I decided to test that and when I used email and browsed the web durign an encode, boom out of sync.

I have never heard of sync issues that can be blamed on doing other things on the PC while encoding. The only thing that should happen is that it takes longer. I have done many (dozens) similar conversions like you describe and sync issues can usually be traced to other problems like bad frames.

As well, I always create a seperate wav file before encoding and use that as my audio source. I can adjust the audio length and the delay if it's required to get the A/V sync correct.

I did notice that you didn't mention scanning for bad frames. That should always be the first step before doing anything else!

[LSchafroth]

Sorry, I didn't mean to "dis" any of the guides. I love the fact people take the time to put them together.

I did some more experimenting and I could not reproduce the out of sync while running other apps. Very strange.

I scanned my AVI's for bad frames and none were found.

I burned my CD-r's at 4x and 2x trying to get rid of the garbled video and chirping sound on my DVD player and could not. For the heck of it I burned one at 16x. Works perfectly. Tried the other two CD's and they work perfect at 16x.

Strange!!

LS

[JeDiBoY]

I used to use other applications during encoding, but the other site said never do that or you will get sync issues with TMPGEnc. I decided to test that and when I used email and browsed the web durign an encode, boom out of sync. When I left the system alone during the encode, perfect.

similar thing happened to me:

when i encoded CD 1 of an avi movie to VCD, i left the computer alone until it was finished

when i encoded CD 2 of the same avi movie to VCD, i had to use the computer as it was doing it. surfing web, etc...

end result:

CD 1 was smooth the whole way

CD 2 was choppy the whole way (but sync was OK)

[funkguy4]

similar thing happened to me:

when i encoded CD 1 of an avi movie to VCD, i left the computer alone until it was finished

when i encoded CD 2 of the same avi movie to VCD, i had to use the computer as it was doing it. surfing web, etc...

end result:

CD 1 was smooth the whole way

CD 2 was choppy the whole way (but sync was OK)

That really shouldn't happen. Having less process time shouldn't cause anything like that. That's like saying a file I encode perfectly on a 800MHz Pentium 3 will come out choppy if I encode it the same way on a 700MHz Pentium 3.