What is the best, easiest and fastet way to convert to SVCD?

[Roob]

I have a P2 with 400 Mhz and 64 MB RAM and only 2 GB free diskspace.

Please post me your answers.

Thank you very much!

[komputer]

From what? DvD? DivX?

[Yeshi]

ok youre computer is what mine used to be like, but i bought 128 megs more of ram, here a good guide that will help you heaps hopefully. First download TMPGEnc from http://www.tmpgenc.com and install and all that stuff
open your file ( i presume its a DVD rip , or else you wouldnt want it in SVCD format ). ok, load the unlock template from TMPGEnc, you will need it. Click setting

Video Tab

Make sure your stream is mpeg-2 480x480 if NTSC (29.97 or 23.97) or 480x576 (25) if PAL

Select 2pass VBR and click setting
configure your bitrates according to how much space you would like the movie to occupy. i used 1800 AVG 2600 MAX 600 MIN

Encode in non-interlace, with a DC coefficient of 10bits, and motion search on HIGH.

advanced tab

in video arrange method, select full screen (keep aspect ratio), dont mess with any of the filters unless you have a really noisy source video

GOP Structure

GOP structure is wierd to explain, so follow my tips, cos this worked a miracle for me. set all the box settings to 1. all four of them, and tick the box detect scene change

Quantize Matrix

change the box from default to MPEG-standard
MAKE SURE U USE FLOATING POINT DCT!
tick the soften block noise setting and use the values around 45 and 30 respectively

Audio

this is easy enough to do yourself

System

Make sure your stream type is MPEG-2 SVCD! and thats it

these settings gave me great results. It will take a very very long time on a P2 400 with 64 RAM (belive me, ive done it) i have a celeron 400 with 192 ram so im barely better off than you. when i say very long time, a 131 minute movie took me a good 25 hours atleast

[Roob]

Yes!
I want to make a SVCD of a DVD.

[Roob]

Thank you very much for your great answer Yeshi!

And how much time does it take you now with 192 mb ram?

[Truman]

The only problem is, 2GB free disk space is not enough to copy the .vob files to HD.
There are several solutions. 1) Buy an at least 10GB HD.
2) decrypt and copy only one .vob to HD, convert to MPEG and delete the vob. copy the 2nd .vob to HD, convert etc.
After you have converted all .vobs to mpeg, join the mpegs. This method may let you end with playback problems.
3) Use a FlasK DeCSS version convert directly off the DVD to MPEG. This method may ruin your DVD drive sooner or later.

[mikecito]

To rip, encode, and split all at once, just use DVDx. A link to download it is on this site. It doesn't require copying the files to your hard drive. I use it for all my burns. It isn't nearly as fast as TMPGEnc, but it has really high quality when finished. It takes me about 35 hours to do a 2 hour movie on a Pentium 4 1.3 GHZ with 256MB ram. I would suggest this method with your limited resources. You'll have to sleep through more than one night while you wait though.

Mikecito