VCD plays good, SVCD plays choppy on a DV-434

[teamhawaii]

Any idea why a VCD would play just fine on my Pioneer DV-434 and an SVCD play choppy during high motion scenes?

I encoded both my MPG and MPG2 off of the same AVI source using the VCD(NTSC) and SVCD(NTSC) templates in TMPGEnc.

Is there something with the templates that I should be checking?

[patrickm]

your bitrate might be too high. pioneer's aren't actually 'SVCD Players'. they will play svcd discs, but their bitrate tops out around 2500kbps, lower than the standard. try encoding an svcd clip around 2200kbps video/192 audio and see if that works without skipping.

and you don't mean block noise by 'choppy' do you? that's a whole different problem.

[teamhawaii]

Cool thanks! I will try that out and post my results..

And no, I don't mean block noise as choppy. The motion of the video is choppy during high motion scenes. However, I do notice blocky noise on certain areas.. any tips for fixing that or is it just a fact of VCD/SVCD pictures?


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On 2001-07-20 14:52:03, patrickm wrote:
your bitrate might be too high. pioneer's aren't actually 'SVCD Players'. they will play svcd discs, but their bitrate tops out around 2500kbps, lower than the standard. try encoding an svcd clip around 2200kbps video/192 audio and see if that works without skipping.

and you don't mean block noise by 'choppy' do you? that's a whole different problem.
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[teamhawaii]

Nope.. same thing.. Strange. I had another MPEG2 clip that someone else encoded at 2000 Kbps video/224 Kbps audio and it plays fine. Must be something else, eh? Problem is, I can't contact the dude that did this other clip.

Any other tips?

[patrickm]

you may also want to try swapping field order when you encode, and/or deinterlacing. i'm not sure what you mean by 'choppy'. does the a/v actually 'skip' like a bad spot on an audio cd? or is it something to do with the stream itself?

[teamhawaii]

Ok let me try those changes..

The video is choppy as though it is missing frames. For example, say a guy on the screen is waving his hand. On screen, it is not smooth like you see in real life. On screen his hand jumps from one spot to the next and is not fluid. I don't think it would be dropped frames since it plays fine on my PC. The audio is fine though, plays on through the choppy video.

[wildcatfan]

you didn't encode to 23.976 fps did you? That isn't supported in svcd but is in vcd. My player plays like dump when I do that (but it does still play it, just crappily)

Michael

[patrickm]

try encoding the MPEG as progressive output instead of interlaced.

[teamhawaii]

Nope, it's encoded at 29.97... I'll try the progressive output and see how that works. Whew, anyone know of any place that buys COASTERS?! Heheh

[patrickm]

why not test with 5 minute clips and cd-rw?

[teamhawaii]

I was out of CDRWs.. but that's a good idea. In all this frustration I cant seem to think straight hehe

[teamhawaii]

Whew I'm getting there.. I was reading some other posts here and there and decided to test out other settings. This one guy posted an excellent list on his TMPGEnc template for his DV-434 also. He was in PAL, so I tried to substitute NTSC settings where possible.

I've tried a CQ Bitrate of 2300 with a VBV of 0. And it started to look good, but I was getting the 2/3 - 1/3 video on screen. I couldnt find a way fix that except to encode my output to 704x480. Would encoding at a different size cut the encoding time? If so, how would I do it?

Now my SVCDs are playing good, no choppy motion. However, I need to tweak the blocky noise. Got any tips on that?

Thanks for all your help dudes...

[patrickm]

VBV =112
source aspect=1:1 (if a capture)
display aspect 4:3
size 480x480
arrange method= center (w/aspect)
in the template (open it as a text file in notepad/wordpad):
find the lines named
MPEG.Display.Height= (480?)
MPEG.Display.Width= (576?)
(i think that's what it is in PAL)
change both values to 480
this should fix the 2/3-1/3 thing. there's a tool called fix12c.exe (i've posted the link a couple times.) it will fix these headers in files already encoded (set to vert 480, horiz 480). these tags are set incorrectly in the TMPG templates, but few players actually know what to do with them, however pioneer does.

[teamhawaii]

Cool, I'll try that too..

how about toning down some of the block noise.. it's not too bad, but any tips you have on helping reduce it during high motion scenes would be great!

[wildcatfan]

I heard pioneers don't like 480x480. Try 352x480 instead. It still looks pretty good.

Michael

[patrickm]

i have had a pioneer 414, 525 (my brother's) and now a 343 (since the 414 was broken while i was moving), and my neighbor has a 434. they all handle 480x480 just fine as long as the aspect ratio is set correctly and the SDE display tags have the right values.

just use the fix12c.exe program or fix the template before you encode.

[teamhawaii]

Yep.. no problem with 480x480.. I finally got this puppy churning on SVCDs.. Thanks to patrickm and some others on this forum. AWESOME.

Now to learn how to optimize.. Any tips?

What I'm trying to do is cut down the file size so that I can get it down on one CD. Anyone know what is the max length of a video they fit successfully on one CD with good decent video quality?

[gf]

I have a DV-434 pioneer also. So what were the final changes/settings you did to get this puppy working? Thanks alot.

[ralfbeckers]

This is actually what made it work for my 434! You can read all about how to make GOOD SVCDS on the player's respective page on this site. Actually, the 434 will not play standard SVCDs but only 704 by 576 (for PAL) resolution with buffer sizte set to zero (automatic).

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-07-21 22:50:13, patrickm wrote:
you may also want to try swapping field order when you encode, and/or deinterlacing. i'm not sure what you mean by 'choppy'. does the a/v actually 'skip' like a bad spot on an audio cd? or is it something to do with the stream itself?
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

[teamhawaii]

The setting that helped fixed my choppy play was adjusting the Bitrate. At first I used the standard SVCD template that came with TMPGEnc. After help from patrickm and ralfbeckers, I adjusted it to a lower range.

What I've tried that seems to work fine are bitrates fron 2500 and lower. I've tested ranges from 2500 and lower on methods of CQ, CBR, and Auto VBR. All seem to work AOK. What is strange is that my additional settings is not the same as ralf, but they seem to work OK as well. For instance, INTERLACE, and FIELD ORDER. I set mine to INTERLACED and FIELD ORDER B, contrary to ralf's. I'm going to try ralf's and see what happens.

On NTSC, I got it to play normal SVCDs (480x480) by fixing the bad template I was using in TMPGEnc.

I'm now trying to tweak it by cutting down the blockiness and such, however, dont know what to do there. Anyone got any ideas?