A very basic guide to SUPER

[guns1inger]

I have been asked to put together a simple guide to SUPER that will be used by students ranging in age from around 10 - 17. Most will be converting YouTube vids, mobile phone footage (mostly .3gp) and digital still camera movies for editing in Windows Movie maker. I tell you this so you understand the context in which this has been prepared. It is not a complex guide, but it does go through things slowly and clearly.

I figured this was a good place to share it, and to get feedback on it's usefulness and accuracy. Happy to get feedback either here, or via PM.

Hope someone finds it useful.

[guns1inger]

Because the guide is a PDF, it needs to be linked to a response, not the original post. So here it is



basicsuperguide.pdf

[dlflannery]

Thanks for a great guide, Gunslinger!

I currently use gui4ffmpeg to convert interlaced TFF mpeg2 videos to different resolution and from mp2 to ac3 audio. I've found I must add the following flags in the ffmpeg command line to maximize probability of good output files in some problem cases:

-flags ilme+ildct -top 1

This forces the TFF interlace in the output file, which is best for interlaced displays.

I probably should just download super and find this out for myself, but do you know what it does with interlaced mpeg2 input? Does the gui show some options for handling it and specifying the interlace/progressive properties of the output file?

[guns1inger]

By default, SUPER is set to deinterlace when encoding mpeg2 video, whether it be just a video stream, or authored as VOBs. You can turn this off (or back on again) by clicking on Other Options under the video Options panel. There is no setting to tell SUPER if your source is top or bottom field first, so you have to trust it's field order detection is right, or be prepared to use restream to alter the field order if it misses.

Personally, I wouldn't use SUPER for converting for DVD when there are better options such as HCenc available.

[xxnatalie]

Well, I feel pretty stupid because you seem to know exactly what you're talking about, but I thought I'd ask a little favor. Your guide was very nice, & helped me understand a bit more about SUPER, but honestly... I have no clue what I'm doing. Normally I'd just give up :] but this is kind of important to me.
All I'm trying to do is make a .flv video into whatever format will play on a dvd (haha. I'm guessing that's MPEG..?). But believe it or not, SUPER confuses the hell out of me & I have no idea what settings to use. So... I just wanted to ask if you would mind helping me out. If you had the time. Or patience. Or even if you just gave me a couple of tips, I would appreciate that SO much :]

[guns1inger]

It depends on exactly what type of .flv it is as to whether or not SUPER can convert it. Basic .flv is fine (youtube etc). For the sake of this example, let's assume SUPER will convert it.

Drop your .flv onto the file area of SUPER. Double-click it and find out the resolution and framerate. Compare these to What is DVD (top left corner of this page) to find the closest match. Most .flvs seem to be fairly low resolution, so one of the VCD resolutions will probably be the best fit. Hopefully, one will match exactly.

Select Mpeg (MpegII) as the output container, MpegII for the video codec, and either mp2 or AC3 as the audio codec.

Set your resolution and bitrate. If the resolution is low, use a bitrate of around 1680. If the resolution is higher, use a higher bitrate - maybe mid-3000's. Given the generally low quality of .flv files, higher bitrates will be wasted. Audio must be set to 48000, bitrate of 192 or 224 will be enough.

Click on encode. Once it is finished, you will have to author the mpg file to DVD. TDA is probably a good starting point.


There is a much easier solution - ConvertXtoDVD will convert most .flv files to DVD (as well as a great many other file types) and is very simple to use. It is not, however, free.