Noob - converting an Indian Movie vcd to DVD

[sleazy_frank]

Hi all - this might present a bit of a challenge I don't know; I'm a bit of a noob.

My in laws brought back from India a film my wife has been after for ages; but instead of it being on vhs which would have been easy to encode directly to mpeg2, chapter, menu and burn to DVD, it came on 3 VCDs with no logical menu structure, resulting in disc swapping and holding down 1 to get the thing going in our player.

So I decided to cut my "VCD to DVD" teeth on this. Using ISOBuster, I managed to get from the cds three 1 hour long (approx 550mb each) MPEG1 clips. Using Encore, I tried to create a logical menu structure but the program wasn't happy with the files. I tried a demo of DVDLab which was happy with the video but complained about the audio when it tried to demux it.

I tried importing the files into Cyberlinks PowerProducer 2.5 which came free with the machine and they imported and played fine. So I tried exporting one of the three 1 hr files as an MPEG2 file with the settings set to low, seeing as the video was vhs quality already and was now an MPEG1 and the sound was okay. Forty mins later, I had a 1.8gb MPEG2 with the sound I think out of sync. And with the film being 3 hours long, that's over 5gb, which is too big for a dvd. Hmm.

I've seen https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=217351 which looks promising but it's a little confusing - sorry I'm only a noob! Capturing video and editing it is as far as I've got - ripping vcd to mpeg1, demuxing video/audio to mpeg2 and beyond is a little beyond my reach.

Is this link the answer? http://www.dvd-guides.com/guides.php?category=othertodvd&name=vcdtodvd

thanks!

frank

[bugster]

The video on a VCD is already DVD compliant (unless its NTSc film rate of 23.976fps, then you have to re-encode). So 1st thing to do is confirm that it is valid. Take one your mpegs and open it with bitrate viewer. Check the framerate and resolution match the requirements for VCD. If so continue.

Download and install TmpGenc (the free version). Start TmpGenc and cancel the wizard. Select file->mpeg tools, simple de-multiplex. Select one of your mpegs as source and select paths/filenames for the two output files (video (.m1v) and audio (.mp2)). Hit Run. You should now have a movie.m1v file and a movie.mp2 file. The video is fine but the audio needs some work. VCD audio is sampled at 44.1khz, DVD requires it be 48khz.

Start TmpGenc again and cancel the wizard. Select your movie.mp2 file as the audio source (no video source selected, make sure this is empty)and select a new filename as the output file, still with the .mp2 extension. In the bottom RH corner under 'stream type' select the radio button labelled 'Audio Only'. Now click the Settings button and you should have only the Audio tab. Make sure Stream type is set to Mpeg-1 Audio Layer II and sampling frequency to 48000. Click OK.
Click Start. A few minutes later you should end up with a new .mp2 file with the correct sampling rate.

You can now repeat this process for the other two mpeg files then author to DVD. DVD-Lab is a good choice for this kind of movie and you can use the connections menu to ensure the 3 movies are played one after the other without returning to the menu or joining them together to one large file.

Hope this helps.

[sleazy_frank]

Thanks for this - extremely concise and easy to follow. Got my 6 seperate tracks last night (3 vid and 3 audio) - easy as pie. Going to author them tonight. Many thanks for your help!

frank